Re: Conflicts and fiber cuts

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

On Sun, 6 Mar 2022, Laura Smith via NANOG wrote:
> You do realise there's a shedload of fibre running around Europe ? 
> There are so many redundant paths that you'd have to chop through quite 
> a lot of it before anyone noticed much difference.

Historically, the largest telecommunication outages have been due to 
operator error & software bugs (or the malicious equivalent). Problems in 
large networks have more impact.

Vulnerability to physical damage varies a lot between countries.  Some 
countries have a lot of redundancy, other countries have limited 
redundancy.

The big question for decision makers are trends.

Are these 'normal' outage trends or 'unusual' outage trends.  One farmer 
on a tractor digging up fiber may be normal. Two farmers is a concidence. 
More than two farmers is abnormal.

<Insert my usual the importance of information sharing speech here>