Mailing List Archive

Kameron Gasso wrote:
> Anyone have the scoop on a supposed fiber bundle cut in the Portland, OR
> area? We have a DS3 in the area that's been dead in the water for over
> 8 hours, and I'm now getting conflicting stories from our carrier and
> LEC technicians.

One of our vendor/customers has been reporting a fiber cut in the "North
Western US Region, affecting major carriers." Some of their customers
may experience loss of Caller ID and/or Long Distance dialing. Initial
report 1441CST showing 4-6 hours until fiber is repaired and a possibly
wrong start time of 2330CST. First follow-up at 1630CST showing
estimated 24 hours until fiber is repaired and a start time of 1330CST.
Second follow-up at 1930CST still showing 24 hours to repair, but with
a resolution update indicating "Major National Carrier(s) fiber repair
teams have been on site splicing the damaged fiber. The fiber repair is
scheduled for completion tonight between 1900CST and 2300CST."

I know they have at least some operations in the Seattle area, either
organically or via acquisition, but their trouble reports are often
vague, last-minute, misdirected, erroneous, or a combination thereof, so
take any or all of the above with the appropriate pinch of salt. (Their
post-mortems are worse, with <someone> outright lying to me: the
technician was honest about their mixup, saying "we plugged your
transport OC3 into our router, OOPS!!!", but the VP saying "<your> OC3
is set up as a UPSR while the OC48 is BLSR. <Our technician> deleted a
logical cross connect while turning up an OC12 on our network. This
cross connect was the protect side of one of the STS1s on your OC3 but
did not map correctly during a ring switch event on the 48 because it
was not there. <Another technician> corrected the problem but had some
difficulty explaining this to your data guy as a transport guy."

pt

Pete Templin wrote:
> One of our vendor/customers has been reporting a fiber cut in the "North
> Western US Region, affecting major carriers." Some of their customers
> may experience loss of Caller ID and/or Long Distance dialing. Initial
> report 1441CST showing 4-6 hours until fiber is repaired and a possibly
> wrong start time of 2330CST. First follow-up at 1630CST showing
> estimated 24 hours until fiber is repaired and a start time of 1330CST.
> Second follow-up at 1930CST still showing 24 hours to repair, but with
> a resolution update indicating "Major National Carrier(s) fiber repair
> teams have been on site splicing the damaged fiber. The fiber repair is
> scheduled for completion tonight between 1900CST and 2300CST."

All is well again with our issue; Global Crossing has reportedly
re-spliced the fiber, and states that the length of the outage was
primarily caused by the difficulty in accessing the cable due to the
break being near the banks of the Columbia River.

--Kameron