About 500 iProvo customers lost service on Thursday when a truck snagged some lines on Timpview Dr, severing 3 major cables. There were no injuries and Broadweave expects to have the lines repaired by mid-day on Sunday. This is their first test of their ability to maintain the network.
iProvo Outage After Truck Snags Lines
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My favorite part of the article…
“Broadweave, in Thursday’s statement, said that the ring architecture of its cable network helps to limit an outage of this nature to the fewest customers possible. If the ring should become severed, the signal is automatically re-routed to travel through the alternate side of the loop for all customers serviced within that length of cable, the company said.”
Yeppers.. Us Broadweave be so smart building the network as a ring. Yep Broadweave very smart.
Because we all know that iProvo didn’t desgin/build the network.. nope. It was the smarties at Broadweave who did it all.
Of course this article tells us that ring fiber was hit as well as individual customer fibers in that neighborhood. With the temperature as it is, someone needs to be driving around and looking for sagging cable so this does not happen again.
Happened to UTOPIA last summer to in Orem. But I think we got everyone up and running within 18 hours. Still had unlit fiber to repair but we focused on the lit fiber first to reduce customer downtime.
I wonder if Traverse Ridge was built with self healing redundent rings as Provo was?
I think this was a much bigger cut than the Orem cut. They are likely not splicing the active lines first as that would cost twice as much. Customer service vs. finance decision?
This is a very bad break for everyone (including UTOPIA) as it does show a slight down side to very fiber rich networks. They cannot be repaired as quickly as traditional HFC networks or as cheaply.
This single incident (one truck catches a bundle of fibers) will have customers out for 4 days or more, and cost what $25k to $50k to fix? An HFC network might have been able to be back up by prime-time that evening and many customers might not have even know it went down if they were at work?