Tag Archive for: Fiber

Today, a California ghost town can have fiber to the doorstep—but it’s not easy

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Dave Loschiavo

Totally understand why the author wants to live here.

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SLOAT, Calif.—Plumas County is rural, mountainous, and at the far north of the Sierra Nevada Range. In area, it is larger than the individual states of Rhode Island and Delaware, but the population here is under 20,000. It all makes for a beautiful place to live, but some amenities that are common in more densely populated areas can be hard to come by.

High-speed Internet access that’s reliable across all seasons of the year is one clear example. In 2014, the local cable TV provider (New Day Broadband) went bankrupt, taking with it the only source for cable-based Internet access in the town of Quincy, California. It was also the only tethered high-speed provider accepting new customers. AT&T used to offer DSL in the area, but the company stopped taking on new clients and does not allow existing customers to transfer service. And while both satellite Internet access and multiple WISPs (wireless ISPs) are available, both of these delivery methods face reliability challenges in stormy, snowy weather (a common occurrence for this area in the winter).

With that in mind, you can imagine my surprise when in recent years I learned a local ISP—Plumas Sierra Telecommunications—now offers fiber to the doorstep. This new availability of reliable, high-speed Internet access allowed me to shift from an office job to telecommuting, meaning my wife and I could return to the rural Sierra Nevada after 15 years of living in the metropolis of Southern California.

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Technology Lab – Ars Technica

IDG Contributor Network: Fiber map sheds light on infrastructure trends and weaknesses

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If you’ve ever wondered just where the fiber conduits that carry our Internet traffic run, wonder no more. Researchers have created a map.

Four years in the making, the map, sourced in part from public records, shows the long-haul fiber that carries Internet data around the country. Additionally, locations where multiple cables connect are shown.

This kind of map has never existed before.

Internet infrastructure

Not much is known about “today’s physical Internet infrastructure,” the researchers say.

So they delved in and, through a collection of Tier-1 ISP and cable company maps combined with public records, started to construct a map of the long-haul fiber network (PDF).

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Network World Security

Another sign of Google Fiber worship

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Network World Paul McNamara

Fiber bandits: FBI hunting serial fiber-cutting vandals in California

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AT&T recently announced a $ 250,000 reward to anyone with information on whoever entered its underground facilities in Livermore, California – a San Francisco suburb – and severed two of its fiber cables earlier this week, USA Today reported yesterday.

The vandalism echoes 14 similar attacks that have destroyed damaged fiber cables and disrupted internet service for customers of several service providers in the northern California region dating back to July 2014.

USA Today also reported a similar attack in late June, when “someone broke into an underground vault and cut three fiber-optic cables belonging to Colorado-based service providers Level 3 and Zayo,” according to an earlier USA Today report. The FBI confirmed at the time that it was investigating connections between that attack and 11 similar outages in the region over the year prior. 

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Network World Colin Neagle