Hello,
As some of you probably already know, our (Fibre Lac) 144-fibers cable
was completely cut yesterday on the motorway between Basel and Zürich,
somewhere on the communal territory of KaiserAugst, in Canton Argau,
near the border with Basel-Land.
On this part of the motorway, there are a lot of ducts burried,
something like six 120mm ducts and twelve 34 mm. The people doing work
there were installing new driver crash barriers, which is done by
digging holes for the posts and then putting the posts in the holes.
They go as far as 1m for the barrier to be correctly installed. The 34mm
fiber ducts, used by Fibre Lac and two international operators, are
burried below the six 120mm ducts, and the whole thing is filled with
concrete. The workers still managed to have the posts go through two
(empty) 120mm ducts and reached, 60cm under the ground, fiber optics
cables, among which they broke several the tubes, but only one really
filled with fibers, ours. The other operators were not cut.
Among impacted customers and partners, there were several operators and
internet exchanges, and especially SwissIX and IXEurope (TIX link
Geneva-Zurich). We then quickly started to look for a rescue solution at
least for the active network (we couldn't really find a 144-fibers
unsused cable on another path), and we managed to have a rescue link set
up at about 22:40, thanks to several people :
- Freddy Kuenzler, Init7, for lending the fiber pair, and spending hours
trying to get the whole thing working,
- Sascha Kaufmann, IXEurope, for spending hours trying to get the whole
thing working,
- Herr Bolliger, IWB, for spending hours trying to get the whole thing
working, when it was public holidays in Basel.
Today, at 5am, a 200m temporary fiber cable was replacing the broken
one, laid down in a temporary duct behind the fence along the motorway,
this is obviously not secure, but at least bytes can flow again. We're
working on the definitive solution, which means re-opening the motorway,
changing the damaged duct parts, and blow a new cable.
If you want more information, I'll be happy to provide you with it,
since I believe it's quite an ususual incident and I think it's better
for everyone to know what happens and what is done !
I and Fibre Lac globally, we are really sorry for every one of you who
got issues directly or indirectly due to this incident.
Thank you for your understanding !
Guillaume