CircleID

In follow up to a significant outage in New York City's East Village earlier this month, Time Warner Cable has posted a detailed look at the incident caused by fire melting a portion of the fiber-optic network, affecting 24,000 customers in the area.

Jeff Simmermon, Time Warner Cable's Director of Digital Communication writes: "It took the better part of the day to identify the problem, dig in, seperate the cable out and splice in a new piece of fiber-optic cable. Each of those hair-width fibers [shown in photographs] has to be reconnected to precisely the correct wire, or else the whole thing doesn't work. Imagine re-connecting a severed ponytail and you've got the basic idea. This is both extremely unusual and business as usual for us. It's extremely unusual because, well, freakish subterranean fires don't happen that often. And while outages are an unfortunate part of running a big, complex system, one that affects that many people for that long is pretty rare."

Related topics: Access Providers, Broadband, Telecom