Fibre Separation ...

Heard a great one today!

A groundworks company is about to run yet another set of fibre ducts past our house - there are already probably four there already. Spoke with the site and contract managers to ensure access is maiontained and ask why they are not duct sharing. Various reasons and one was that data centre fibre optic cable must be separated from other data centre fibre optic cables by 5 or 0.5 metres (bad line so it could have been either). I asked why - they had no idea and I have no idea either.

Can anyone think why?

Purely so that an inadvertent / accidental cut of a fibre doesn't affect both runs.

0.5m is too close. In my opinion 5m is pushing it. When I have bought physically diverse routes in the past they are usually many metres apart at their closest points (where they enter buildings generally),

In this case they were talking about competitors fibre, not their own!.


Years back, in the late 90s we had a pair of diverse runs - Cornwall to London and apart from the first mile or two they were generally 2 to 50 miles apart! Until one was down for planned maintenance and then someone put an excavator through the second.

Edited by MHC (Mon 19-May-25 15:20:37)

In reply to a post by MHC:

then someone put an excavator through the second.

how long did that take to repair....

?

Cannot remember exactly but probably hours. From memory, the one under maintenance was brought back up.

A long time ago (1990s) Demon Internet had 2 redundant links across the Atlantic which terminated in different data centres somewhere on the East coast.

What they hadn't allowed for was that these independent connections both ran across the opposite sides of the same bridge, and sure enough said bridge collapsed due to a flood resulting in total lost of connectivity. Due to commercial confidentiality they had not been told exactly where the cables ran and thus were unable to ensure that this didn't happen.

In reply to a post by rippedcotton:

A long time ago (1990s) Demon Internet had 2 redundant links across the Atlantic which terminated in different data centres somewhere on the East coast.

What they hadn't allowed for was that these independent connections both ran across the opposite sides of the same bridge, and sure enough said bridge collapsed due to a flood resulting in total lost of connectivity. Due to commercial confidentiality they had not been told exactly where the cables ran and thus were unable to ensure that this didn't happen.

These days you can get fibre maps as a customer under NDA. The problem I've seen in another country is where you get promised one thing and something else is delivered.