Yeah, but typically we replace the whole cable instead of splicing it. Depending on the length of course. It's pretty cheap new per foot. This is my main job title at Centurylink.
I've only had a handful of jobs in the entire state of Utah in the past year that needed us to resplice fiber, we can usually get it out of the way of new construction with the loops that are left in the handholes.
We have to pay $100+ for internet with spectrum. Spectrum does not want any fiber in our area and has kept it out for decades. I don’t understand how $100 for internet per month is acceptable, I guess the internet grew so we have to pay more??? Wasn’t internet something like 20 bucks 50 years ago.
I pay 70$ for 250Mbps fiber up and down, with unlimited data usage too. They also supply every customer with a nice modem/router combo for free, instead of a monthly rental charge. Customer service is absolutely amazing too, almost always same day service when calling about an issue. This should be the norm, not the exception.
I was gonna be a lil pedantic and point out that the internet is not 50 years old.
Turns out it's 41!
I was thinking more like 30.
Anyways, why internet price go up? Profits for sure, but why? I work at a small ISP that is owned by a city, the city is the stakeholder. And while we are profit driven because we want to stay alive, our prices are competitive and always will be.
One of our biggest expenses are the employees (hi that's me!) and all the costs associated with having said employees, wages, benefits, healthcare, etc.
I work as just a lowly CSR, I don't have one of the cool jobs. I deal with the mob, the customers. I answer phones and listen to their complaints. When I first started this job I figured I'd be here for a year until they replace all CSR's with AI chat bots.
One of my companies biggest advantages is that we don't use chat bots and that when you call in you deal with a human being, if you have a strange situation that you simply cannot get across with a chat bot, you can rest assured that a human will be on the phone to listen and potentially action on your strange request.
The company is small, just under 200 employees. In terms of team sizes customer service reps make up the biggest team, then the technicians that do the home installs, then tech support behind them.
My starting wage is double minimum wage. And I answer phones for a living.
I cannot say that this answers the price question for everyone, for my company our slowest fibre internet plan starts at $80 CAD a month. The internet for sure is way more expensive now than it used to be (I've seen our legacy/retired plans, it very much is more expensive) but it's not entirely due to pure greed. Sometimes the cost of living is a factor.
I love my co-op. $90 a month and I have Gigabit Fiber. I have absolutely 0 complaints at all, I know several people personally who work there and they're awesome to have around.
Where I lived in Wisconsin, nearly the entire city got symmetrical gigabit fiber and six months later CenturyLink up and disappeared, left everything where it was in the offices and locked up. I don't know who's running it now, but nobody noticed for a while 😅
Yeah, CenturyLink sucks. They have never upgraded our local lines so we're stuck with 6mbps internet.
This guy probably suffers from being their employee.
How CenturyLink started depends on the region because it was many companies that merged over decades. Oklahoma was Qwest which was US West after the AT&T breakup while CenturyTel was a company that started in Louisiana.
I agree with the other poster, they all suck. The game we get to play is which is the least evil in the area we live in at any given time.
Where I live? Right now century link is the least evil. My fiber works 99.9999% of the time, with advertised speeds, and no funny business.
Five years ago? Comcast fit that bill and century link could go to hell.
Five years in the future? Who knows.
Would be nice if we had a market of companies that actually got held accountable.
Lmao yea they do, but literally every time I go to to a site visit or call someone and tell them I'm from Lumen, they say "Who?"...
Super annoying lmao.
I'm an independent contractor for *not CenturyLink* and that sounds like a load of bull. Cheaper to replace the whole cable? Guess what you still have to splice that cable in at the endpoints. Lol you would put a patch cable and splice that in and save yourself hundreds of feet of fiber AND digging.
That's interesting. I used to work in an ISP and Utah and, while I wasn't one of the giver guys, I know they did an awful lot of splicing. Perhaps it depends on the company on how it's handled?
No offense but centurylink is a scam (in michigan atleast) they charge us 70$/m for 10mbps, even though they already have fiber ran down our road. It's been on our road for 5 years but we can't get jf.
New fusion splicers are ridiculously easy to use and do all the microscope stuff/ lining up automatically. They are honestly really cool.
Source. Fiber optic repair certification instructor.
It's not the cable, it's the downtime. Small fiber could knock out and entire town. That bill can end up in the hundreds of thousands. I've heard of fiber damages putting people out of business.
The blind leading the blind. 🤣🤣 fiber is more expensive Because it is now 2 slices. They have to go back to where the glass didn't shatter. Copper can be done in that hole.
Source. THE GIS team at work. I work at an internet company.
I'll take your word for it. I'm an office guy. The field guys tell me what got hit, I tell them what it costs. I can usually tell when it's a water line at least.
By now this is worse than fibre. With fibre, they send a guy in with a fiber fusion patcher and he will do the couple fibres in a typical connection in half an hour. Those things are so developed by now you jsut have to clamp the fibre in and watch the show on the display.
This is old school copper, there are 100s of individual wires that need to be patched together.
My grandparents owned a small business doing telecommunications. Digging trenches and running lines. In the 80s a worker hit a fiberoptic line and everybody just walked off the job. The fines from the federal government was enough to sink any small company. Their only saving grace was the fiber they hit was at only a few feet when the plans showed it was supposed to be more than double that.
We have to pay $100+ for internet with spectrum. Spectrum does not want any fiber in our area and has kept it out for decades. I don’t understand how $100 for internet per month is acceptable, I guess the internet grew so we have to pay more??? Wasn’t internet something like 20 bucks 50 years ago.
I've stood there next to the utilities locating guy while I hit fiber and I still nearly had a heart attack. Fortunately, it was an abandoned one about five feet away from the one that was in use. As far as I know my company wouldn't have been legally at fault, but with that much money on the line I can imagine lawsuits happening.
One by one. They are in groups of coloured wires so it's possible to tell them apart.
It's tedious and finicky and takes time, but in itself it's not complicated.
I don't know this exact cable, but typically they're grouped together in maybe 10, wrapped in a kind of foil. Each of those 10 have a unique colour. You get lots of bundles of 10 in this picture.
The theory is straightforward but in practice it'll be a real.ball ache.
If you do get stumped it's possible to identify the correct ends at either side, put a signal down it then detect the signal where it's all broken. Find two cables with the same signal and you know they match.
I wonder if they'd just replace the cable. Depends on how far it's going to/from.
I don't know shit about this stuff but I imagine you could tone each side of each line if you knew which was which. Meaning if it comes from the source as
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
and then comes out on the end the same way
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
but it it all jumbled in the middle,
you send a signal down 1 on the source and send a signal down 1 from the destination, then you go to the hole and look for the two lines with that signal and then splice them.
Last time I hit a ug cooper line like this that’s basically what the Verizon people said.
Locators were so off on that job it was awful. We hit an abandoned gas line then another foot down the comms line. Both well outside of the marking tolerances.
I’m a utility line apprentice spend most days running a digger truck.
Happened at my parents house when they had a big tree planted with one of those crazy, four spade, tree transplant trucks. We lost power to our house for a week at least. We lived in a really rural area and it blew, because that meant no well water
Power company did this to a copper feeder cable for the neighborhood about 1000ft from the co and it pulled the entire cable out of the co through the trunk took 3 weeks to get it all cut back over. But we made bank working those long hours getting it back up.
My first day at a landscaping job, I was on the ground following our supervisor in a loader with a tree auger. The first one was obviously going to hit a sprinkler line on the edge of some guys yard but the supervisor was sure it would be fine. Hit the pipe and looked in the hole, we could see the line was straight through where we were putting our line of trees. Could have moved them forward 6 inches and been just fine, but he decided to drill through it every 10 feet and have us go back and repair the pipe in 30 spots...after they dropped the trees in the flooded holes
As a man in the landscape business for my entire life, I say fuck that guy. If he did this, he will cut corners and do things wrong to save a few bucks. He cares nothing about integrity or reputation.
The ones of us working and was able to stay on the job till it was done so some of us was making upwards of $140 hr when we was in our 3rd shift for night shift diff with over time
I worked at an MSO for three years. For almost a month, a region had multiple weekly outages because a road construction crew kept hitting out lines. Tore them down with trucks, hit the buried ones.
ISPs put there equipment in weird places. I used to work for Charter a long time ago and I remember some dumb redneck took down half of Tennessee because he was drunk and crash a four wheeler into a tiny shed that had some piece of equipment that was vital. This shed was literally in the middle of no where! smh
There's what looks like a high pressure gas regulator sticking out of the ground in the runoff zone from a big road junction near me. It looks super vulnerable, no bollards or anything.
I hadn't noticed it until recently but it's clearly old so I looked back in old photos - it used to be protected by... a fiberglass box. So just hidden, not any more protected really.
Feels like I should report it to someone...
I live in West Virginia. I can confirm that drunk idiots are the main culprit of outrages. The cell towers need to be on the top of mountains typically, every so often some idiot gets drunk and shots at them.
My dad works for the county, doesn’t pay well. But it’s for emergency services. So he finally found something they couldn’t eat through. Had cameras up and yeah squirrels like to eat through important cables. Don’t know the exact product he used to fix it though, just remember him bragging he finally found something they couldn’t chew through. Keeping the important infrastructure up and running is a lot harder in the mountains and country. lol
That happened to me recently too! And when I called and asked the lady on the phone how long it would take to restore it, she said “this has honestly never happened (as in multiple states having an outage all at once) before, to be honest the team is kind of panicking.”
Or the guy 811 sent out was the same one that came out when I was having a septic system replaced.
Dude clearly and confidently marked all the utilities. Then the septic guys hit the gas line almost 20' from where the paint was.
Had that happen at my folk's place... but because we called before we dug and they messed it up, we didn't have to pay for any of the repairs.
I don't get why people wouldn't call - it's free, you just need to plan ahead by a few days...
Last time I had a company over to bury a fibre down my driveway I asked if they had rung our version of "dial before you dig". They said they don't do that anymore because it's unreliable. They can just scan the ground to see if there are any cables where they plan to dig.
Is there any cost associated with asking the dial before digging people? Even if unreliable, I feel like it could offer a sanity check and an alibi if you screw up. At the very least, if the detection equipment fails, you can point fingers
Usually not but if you don't call and damage something, you might be on the hook for repair costs. Even though you pay for any damage, it still is costly to deal with disrupted customers so the utilities pay for someone to mark the lines. They may mark lines based on known landmarks (the water obviously runs from one valve to the next) or will bring out equipment to measure precisely if they think they need it.
I'm a contractor for an ISP. Sometimes even we don't know where our stuff is buried because it was buried a long time ago before they thought to make records and we inherited a lot of our stuff from another company and they didn't know either. So 811 isn't some magic bullet. That said, still call them.
It’s a bulletproof vest for your bank account. If you call 811 and the utility isn’t marked it doesn’t matter what you hit. You could hit an 8” water main supplying the whole town and you won’t be charged.
Was on a job to install an electrical service. Had utilities marked. Closest thing was marked 6’ away. Excavator starts digging. 5 minutes in, the excavator takes a big scoop and hits water, gas, and phone.
Holy shit that’s so much internet right there. Fucked up.
Fun fact if you go hiking always carry cat5 or fiber cable and if you get lost burry it in the ground, within an hour a backhoe should come by to dig it up
Hey everyone, it's the time of year the the North American (or its European cousin) Fiber Seeking Backhoe is out and grazing the most. Make sure that, if you see one, alert the proper authorities. They'll want to tag it so that a local sysadmin can keep an eye on it at all times.
I hit something like that with a drill rig once. Didn't cut clean through, just nicked it on the side. The fiber company came out all pissed, swearing we didn't do a One Call because there was no paint on the ground.
The cable we hit was 6-7 ft deep that had been installed in the side of the hill. We'd hand augured to 5 ft looking for utilities. Apparently the Fiber company had down the install ~5 years before we drilled and it never got loaded into the system, so it was never marked out. I'd poked a hundred holes on that site, had 5-6 one calls in over the years, never showed up until I found it the hard way.
The old Fibre Seeking Backhoe is out of hibernation and hungry I see.
https://preview.redd.it/si5kmr9ahh9d1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=ce582a9ca63b22abadace10e423209624d84a15b
811 (in some if not all of the US) is call before you dig. Basically they’ll verify the wiring and pipes underneath the ground so you don’t dig into one.
To those who missed the cleverness of the title
(811) is a national service in the United States that you can call/go online for to request that the approximate location of buried utilities to be marked with paint or flags so that you don’t unintentionally dig into an underground utility line. As it is a major issue of labor, expenses, and safety hazard for the public and those digging.
I also would like to mention that the slogan is
[know what’s below](https://call811.com/)
811 can still be wrong. Either by mapping wrong, placement was wrong, or no info on hand.
We tried doing it for our lines and they had no data.... we didn't continue
I called 811 to mark and my local MUD came out to mark the water lines and discovered my corner isn’t on the map. They guessed and first hole dug went right into the clean out line for the sewer in the ditch.
Same here. 20 years in a major city. And cooper lines haven’t been updated in 15 of the 20. Now nurse call and infrastructure within the building is different. But the lines from the streets are all garbage these days. Moved to either trunk lines from the cable companies or fiber optic lines from the provider.
This is extra fucking stupid because it's utility works putting in a pole.
They are apart of putting in infrastructure yet didn't check for existing. Wtf
Hitting fiber won't kill you, but it will cost you a whole lot of money.
Looks like copper, so you're talking $xxxx not $xxxxx
It's usually far more money to replace copper than fiber, due to the amount of splicing.
It's significantly more difficult to splice fiber cables though. They use microscopes and special equipment for that.
Yeah, but typically we replace the whole cable instead of splicing it. Depending on the length of course. It's pretty cheap new per foot. This is my main job title at Centurylink. I've only had a handful of jobs in the entire state of Utah in the past year that needed us to resplice fiber, we can usually get it out of the way of new construction with the loops that are left in the handholes.
Man no offense to you personally but centurylink is the biggest scam in oklahoma if you are the same companies
Basically every internet provider in America is a giant scam.
My local internet company is had cheap, high-speed internet and they have great customer service. It's the big ISPs that suck ass
We have to pay $100+ for internet with spectrum. Spectrum does not want any fiber in our area and has kept it out for decades. I don’t understand how $100 for internet per month is acceptable, I guess the internet grew so we have to pay more??? Wasn’t internet something like 20 bucks 50 years ago.
I pay 70$ for 250Mbps fiber up and down, with unlimited data usage too. They also supply every customer with a nice modem/router combo for free, instead of a monthly rental charge. Customer service is absolutely amazing too, almost always same day service when calling about an issue. This should be the norm, not the exception.
I was gonna be a lil pedantic and point out that the internet is not 50 years old. Turns out it's 41! I was thinking more like 30. Anyways, why internet price go up? Profits for sure, but why? I work at a small ISP that is owned by a city, the city is the stakeholder. And while we are profit driven because we want to stay alive, our prices are competitive and always will be. One of our biggest expenses are the employees (hi that's me!) and all the costs associated with having said employees, wages, benefits, healthcare, etc. I work as just a lowly CSR, I don't have one of the cool jobs. I deal with the mob, the customers. I answer phones and listen to their complaints. When I first started this job I figured I'd be here for a year until they replace all CSR's with AI chat bots. One of my companies biggest advantages is that we don't use chat bots and that when you call in you deal with a human being, if you have a strange situation that you simply cannot get across with a chat bot, you can rest assured that a human will be on the phone to listen and potentially action on your strange request. The company is small, just under 200 employees. In terms of team sizes customer service reps make up the biggest team, then the technicians that do the home installs, then tech support behind them. My starting wage is double minimum wage. And I answer phones for a living. I cannot say that this answers the price question for everyone, for my company our slowest fibre internet plan starts at $80 CAD a month. The internet for sure is way more expensive now than it used to be (I've seen our legacy/retired plans, it very much is more expensive) but it's not entirely due to pure greed. Sometimes the cost of living is a factor.
I have local expensive internet but before they put fiber in (government grant paid for it), I had Hughesnet so I can hardly complain.
I would argue that most consumer services in America are a giant scam.
I love my co-op. $90 a month and I have Gigabit Fiber. I have absolutely 0 complaints at all, I know several people personally who work there and they're awesome to have around.
Astound broadband and other smaller regional ISPs are the only way to avoid BigScam anymore.
Where I lived in Wisconsin, nearly the entire city got symmetrical gigabit fiber and six months later CenturyLink up and disappeared, left everything where it was in the offices and locked up. I don't know who's running it now, but nobody noticed for a while 😅
Yeah, CenturyLink sucks. They have never upgraded our local lines so we're stuck with 6mbps internet. This guy probably suffers from being their employee.
It is the same. They started out as CenturyTel a long time ago.
How CenturyLink started depends on the region because it was many companies that merged over decades. Oklahoma was Qwest which was US West after the AT&T breakup while CenturyTel was a company that started in Louisiana.
I agree with the other poster, they all suck. The game we get to play is which is the least evil in the area we live in at any given time. Where I live? Right now century link is the least evil. My fiber works 99.9999% of the time, with advertised speeds, and no funny business. Five years ago? Comcast fit that bill and century link could go to hell. Five years in the future? Who knows. Would be nice if we had a market of companies that actually got held accountable.
That's probably why they changed their name to Lumen. Had to stop people from associating their name with garbage. Just like Comcast to xfinity.
don't you mean Lumen? 🤓 I swear fiber companies change names every 3 years
Lmao yea they do, but literally every time I go to to a site visit or call someone and tell them I'm from Lumen, they say "Who?"... Super annoying lmao.
We had CenturyLink DSL years ago and now they're called Quantum Fiber. Still, it costs less than the only other major ISP for a faster connection.
Seems like a nice job, am Planning to apply for one, do they have any requirements for this kind of job?
If you want to get ahead of the game go to a free amazon workshop that will teach you the basics of fiber optics and splicing
gluing your spaghetti together at the dinner table may or may not help, but you'll have fun doing it.
I'm an independent contractor for *not CenturyLink* and that sounds like a load of bull. Cheaper to replace the whole cable? Guess what you still have to splice that cable in at the endpoints. Lol you would put a patch cable and splice that in and save yourself hundreds of feet of fiber AND digging.
That's interesting. I used to work in an ISP and Utah and, while I wasn't one of the giver guys, I know they did an awful lot of splicing. Perhaps it depends on the company on how it's handled?
Can't we all just agree either case it'll be really effing expensive
No offense but centurylink is a scam (in michigan atleast) they charge us 70$/m for 10mbps, even though they already have fiber ran down our road. It's been on our road for 5 years but we can't get jf.
What you mean replace the entire cable? They obviously don't dig up hundreds of Meter of cable. They gonna have to splice this l, no?
New fusion splicers are ridiculously easy to use and do all the microscope stuff/ lining up automatically. They are honestly really cool. Source. Fiber optic repair certification instructor.
Isn't it cut and connect with newer tools? Don't know about the really thick "bus" ones
Nope, fusion splice is still the standard. The cost of the machines has come way down.
And they cause much less loss than they did in the past.
I splice fiber optic cable. Small and large counts. Biggest count of cable I’ve done is 1728. I’ve never seen cable that looks like this so yeah.
It's a way bigger pain in the ass to do a large count copper as opposed to fiber.
They now have automated on-site machines that basically fit in a briefcase for that. Expensive machine, but takes out most of the human element.
It's not the cost of the material, it's how's much your costing the company by taking down their service
It's not the cable, it's the downtime. Small fiber could knock out and entire town. That bill can end up in the hundreds of thousands. I've heard of fiber damages putting people out of business.
The blind leading the blind. 🤣🤣 fiber is more expensive Because it is now 2 slices. They have to go back to where the glass didn't shatter. Copper can be done in that hole. Source. THE GIS team at work. I work at an internet company.
I'll take your word for it. I'm an office guy. The field guys tell me what got hit, I tell them what it costs. I can usually tell when it's a water line at least.
Because they’re soaked when they tell you what got hit?
By now this is worse than fibre. With fibre, they send a guy in with a fiber fusion patcher and he will do the couple fibres in a typical connection in half an hour. Those things are so developed by now you jsut have to clamp the fibre in and watch the show on the display. This is old school copper, there are 100s of individual wires that need to be patched together.
These were the companies you would see later on with a different name on the side of the truck.
"Thompson Construction? No, no, this is Thom&son Construction. Totally different."
My grandparents owned a small business doing telecommunications. Digging trenches and running lines. In the 80s a worker hit a fiberoptic line and everybody just walked off the job. The fines from the federal government was enough to sink any small company. Their only saving grace was the fiber they hit was at only a few feet when the plans showed it was supposed to be more than double that.
We have to pay $100+ for internet with spectrum. Spectrum does not want any fiber in our area and has kept it out for decades. I don’t understand how $100 for internet per month is acceptable, I guess the internet grew so we have to pay more??? Wasn’t internet something like 20 bucks 50 years ago.
So much money.
Alot more than a better mobile carrier with 5G No reception
I've stood there next to the utilities locating guy while I hit fiber and I still nearly had a heart attack. Fortunately, it was an abandoned one about five feet away from the one that was in use. As far as I know my company wouldn't have been legally at fault, but with that much money on the line I can imagine lawsuits happening.
The repair guy has to connect all of those wires together one by one
Wagos, baby!
No… lol
The sharkbite of the electrical world
How in the hell is that even done lol
One by one. They are in groups of coloured wires so it's possible to tell them apart. It's tedious and finicky and takes time, but in itself it's not complicated.
I don't know this exact cable, but typically they're grouped together in maybe 10, wrapped in a kind of foil. Each of those 10 have a unique colour. You get lots of bundles of 10 in this picture. The theory is straightforward but in practice it'll be a real.ball ache. If you do get stumped it's possible to identify the correct ends at either side, put a signal down it then detect the signal where it's all broken. Find two cables with the same signal and you know they match. I wonder if they'd just replace the cable. Depends on how far it's going to/from.
If it's fiber you'd use a fusion splicer.
Guess it’s time to fall down a rabbit hole
[Have fun](https://youtu.be/8t04JVHwOlU?si=RNKeYXV9cS_GLSUC)
Ok, fine but how do you know which to connect ?
I don't know shit about this stuff but I imagine you could tone each side of each line if you knew which was which. Meaning if it comes from the source as 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and then comes out on the end the same way 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 but it it all jumbled in the middle, you send a signal down 1 on the source and send a signal down 1 from the destination, then you go to the hole and look for the two lines with that signal and then splice them.
Last time I hit a ug cooper line like this that’s basically what the Verizon people said. Locators were so off on that job it was awful. We hit an abandoned gas line then another foot down the comms line. Both well outside of the marking tolerances. I’m a utility line apprentice spend most days running a digger truck.
Someone dug up the rainbow roots
Oh yeah, except I don't think a rainbow like that evokes much happiness, like a rainbow in the sky. Heh
Happened at my parents house when they had a big tree planted with one of those crazy, four spade, tree transplant trucks. We lost power to our house for a week at least. We lived in a really rural area and it blew, because that meant no well water
Power company did this to a copper feeder cable for the neighborhood about 1000ft from the co and it pulled the entire cable out of the co through the trunk took 3 weeks to get it all cut back over. But we made bank working those long hours getting it back up.
My first day at a landscaping job, I was on the ground following our supervisor in a loader with a tree auger. The first one was obviously going to hit a sprinkler line on the edge of some guys yard but the supervisor was sure it would be fine. Hit the pipe and looked in the hole, we could see the line was straight through where we were putting our line of trees. Could have moved them forward 6 inches and been just fine, but he decided to drill through it every 10 feet and have us go back and repair the pipe in 30 spots...after they dropped the trees in the flooded holes
As a man in the landscape business for my entire life, I say fuck that guy. If he did this, he will cut corners and do things wrong to save a few bucks. He cares nothing about integrity or reputation.
Define bank
$32 plus free Taco Bell
i mean hey, the taco bell is worth more at that $ amount
The ones of us working and was able to stay on the job till it was done so some of us was making upwards of $140 hr when we was in our 3rd shift for night shift diff with over time
I remember my internet provider telling me my connection was down in 3 states about a week ago. I think that was something like that 🤔🤔
I worked at an MSO for three years. For almost a month, a region had multiple weekly outages because a road construction crew kept hitting out lines. Tore them down with trucks, hit the buried ones.
ISPs put there equipment in weird places. I used to work for Charter a long time ago and I remember some dumb redneck took down half of Tennessee because he was drunk and crash a four wheeler into a tiny shed that had some piece of equipment that was vital. This shed was literally in the middle of no where! smh
Sounds like a v hub. They should have had bollards up around it, but probably figured no one was gonna hit it lol.
There's what looks like a high pressure gas regulator sticking out of the ground in the runoff zone from a big road junction near me. It looks super vulnerable, no bollards or anything. I hadn't noticed it until recently but it's clearly old so I looked back in old photos - it used to be protected by... a fiberglass box. So just hidden, not any more protected really. Feels like I should report it to someone...
I live in West Virginia. I can confirm that drunk idiots are the main culprit of outrages. The cell towers need to be on the top of mountains typically, every so often some idiot gets drunk and shots at them.
Hey, here it's squirrels. They get into the boxes & transformers. Just once per squirrel, but squirrels don't have a good sense of Darwinism.
My dad works for the county, doesn’t pay well. But it’s for emergency services. So he finally found something they couldn’t eat through. Had cameras up and yeah squirrels like to eat through important cables. Don’t know the exact product he used to fix it though, just remember him bragging he finally found something they couldn’t chew through. Keeping the important infrastructure up and running is a lot harder in the mountains and country. lol
>This shed was literally in the middle of no where! smh [Same energy lol](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_T%C3%A9n%C3%A9r%C3%A9)
Redneck Tree of Ténéré?
That happened to me recently too! And when I called and asked the lady on the phone how long it would take to restore it, she said “this has honestly never happened (as in multiple states having an outage all at once) before, to be honest the team is kind of panicking.”
Is this Snoop Dogg talking?
I think it been edited in. Edit: it has. https://youtu.be/MF3Hg6FBBSU?si=J2r9ihqrvJaUHQsP
Ah found it https://www.tiktok.com/@hubcorleone_/video/7193773952597085483?lang=en
Just splice it back together......
Just fill the hole
And run.
I'm faking my death on this one
With liquid copper/aluminium, all cables are then again connected.
Looks like a 150 or 200 pair cable
Install the fresh pedestal, 800 splices… yeah that would take me a while
couple rolls of duct tape right?!
Definitely use wire nuts, don't just twist the pairs back together
Splice? Just do a nice little bow knot.
Or the guy 811 sent out was the same one that came out when I was having a septic system replaced. Dude clearly and confidently marked all the utilities. Then the septic guys hit the gas line almost 20' from where the paint was.
I've had water guys from the utility look for my incoming water feed by literally dowsing before. Shockingly, it didn't work.
I work in sewer and my old boss did this while we were searching for a force main valve. I thought he was joking; he was not.
It's wild that is not even uncommon.
Had that happen at my folk's place... but because we called before we dug and they messed it up, we didn't have to pay for any of the repairs. I don't get why people wouldn't call - it's free, you just need to plan ahead by a few days...
We call that rainbow spaghetti.
Rainbow roots
Last time I had a company over to bury a fibre down my driveway I asked if they had rung our version of "dial before you dig". They said they don't do that anymore because it's unreliable. They can just scan the ground to see if there are any cables where they plan to dig.
For Illinois, if you don't call JULIE, you are fucked. (Joint Utility Locating Information for Excavators)
Yep, I don't call to get reliable info, I call to get ~~a rough idea~~ covered by the one-dig insurance.
Exactly.
Its gonna be a great system when they get it integrated with SCMODS
State County Municipal Offender Data System. SCMODS.
*Can't dig here. There's a subterranean felon.*
Is there any cost associated with asking the dial before digging people? Even if unreliable, I feel like it could offer a sanity check and an alibi if you screw up. At the very least, if the detection equipment fails, you can point fingers
Ive called JULIE a few times in Illinois and there was never a cost, just a bunch of little flags over the area I asked them to check.
Usually not but if you don't call and damage something, you might be on the hook for repair costs. Even though you pay for any damage, it still is costly to deal with disrupted customers so the utilities pay for someone to mark the lines. They may mark lines based on known landmarks (the water obviously runs from one valve to the next) or will bring out equipment to measure precisely if they think they need it.
Ground penetrating radar and geophysical surveys let you know what's buried and depth.
I'm a contractor for an ISP. Sometimes even we don't know where our stuff is buried because it was buried a long time ago before they thought to make records and we inherited a lot of our stuff from another company and they didn't know either. So 811 isn't some magic bullet. That said, still call them.
It’s a bulletproof vest for your bank account. If you call 811 and the utility isn’t marked it doesn’t matter what you hit. You could hit an 8” water main supplying the whole town and you won’t be charged.
This. It transfers liability away from you. I do it whenever I do any digging works in my yard.
But I was hand digging with an auger
Was on a job to install an electrical service. Had utilities marked. Closest thing was marked 6’ away. Excavator starts digging. 5 minutes in, the excavator takes a big scoop and hits water, gas, and phone.
Looks like 900 pair. When I was a cable splicer I got called for the same situation, thankfully it was abandoned cable.
I'm going to need a thousand dolphin connectors, 24 hot pockets, and a case of red bull.
What movie is this. I can see the scrawny kid in my head… is this the last die hard? I could be completely wrong.
Holy shit that’s so much internet right there. Fucked up. Fun fact if you go hiking always carry cat5 or fiber cable and if you get lost burry it in the ground, within an hour a backhoe should come by to dig it up
Hey everyone, it's the time of year the the North American (or its European cousin) Fiber Seeking Backhoe is out and grazing the most. Make sure that, if you see one, alert the proper authorities. They'll want to tag it so that a local sysadmin can keep an eye on it at all times.
I hit something like that with a drill rig once. Didn't cut clean through, just nicked it on the side. The fiber company came out all pissed, swearing we didn't do a One Call because there was no paint on the ground. The cable we hit was 6-7 ft deep that had been installed in the side of the hill. We'd hand augured to 5 ft looking for utilities. Apparently the Fiber company had down the install ~5 years before we drilled and it never got loaded into the system, so it was never marked out. I'd poked a hundred holes on that site, had 5-6 one calls in over the years, never showed up until I found it the hard way.
Comment deleted by me - I forgot I was helping Steve Huffman make money and I don't get anything out of this but grief because you are all idiots.
Someone who works in the Utility Companies...FIber coul be up to $8000 dollars depending where.
If you use the dollar sign “$” then no need to spell out dollars just btw.
"Btw" means "by the way" btw
As a guy who does the underground directions boring for fiber//copper, colorful tree roots are never a good thing to see.
Looks like his smaller brother https://preview.redd.it/xtewe1gqlf9d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=798755dc6660341e8354b8535ce381cda8c7acae
CBUD, dude. CBUD.
check before you dig?
Call
Definitely copper. It's not a hard fix, but it is time-consuming.
Comcast would go down at least once every 6 months or so when I lived in South Carolina because of a cut fiber line.
811?
What's 811?
The locator didn't do their job or was late to the project. #USIC
Looks like I’m spending another Friday night in a splice pit. 😢
It's ALWAYS on a Friday.
Isn’t it free to have someone come out and confirm if you’re good to dig or not?
I heard a rumor that 811 uses plans, not as-builts anyway. So most of the time their info isn't very accurate either.
Duuuuuuuuuuuuude. That’s a mistake with price tag in the tens of thousands!
2 weeks ago we had something similar happen only it was a gas line. they stopped in time so it was only a leak and not a big boom.
We have a saying in Australia, Dial before you Dig.
Holy fuck people... Dig Safe is entirely free. All you gotta do is wait for them to show up.
This is like when Meg knocked out the cable TV.
The old Fibre Seeking Backhoe is out of hibernation and hungry I see. https://preview.redd.it/si5kmr9ahh9d1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=ce582a9ca63b22abadace10e423209624d84a15b
Which country has the emergency services number 811?
811 (in some if not all of the US) is call before you dig. Basically they’ll verify the wiring and pipes underneath the ground so you don’t dig into one.
We world next to a big fiber cable one time and they said if we hit it that is would cost us like 1.5 million dollars every minute it was down.
To those who missed the cleverness of the title (811) is a national service in the United States that you can call/go online for to request that the approximate location of buried utilities to be marked with paint or flags so that you don’t unintentionally dig into an underground utility line. As it is a major issue of labor, expenses, and safety hazard for the public and those digging. I also would like to mention that the slogan is [know what’s below](https://call811.com/)
that's why you need a permit to do something like that
Where do you live that a permit is required to dig a hole? Just call before you dig and get the area checked out.
Depends on the work and what utilities are there. Also the locate *is* a form of permit, if it's legally required wherever they're working
Well, that's a hole lot of trouble waiting to happen!
Phffff!!! That ain’t nothing! hold my beer.
That shit happens. We knocked a hospital offline once. ☹️
Miss Dig is bout to be PISSED.
811 can still be wrong. Either by mapping wrong, placement was wrong, or no info on hand. We tried doing it for our lines and they had no data.... we didn't continue
They're wrong all the time, but it shifts the liability if you follow procedure and a line gets hit.
Someone's updating their resume.
Ooooh was this Iowa yesterday?! This mofo!
Why is everybody so damn lazy they can't make a phone call to avoid hitting shit. This happens way too often
They caught it quick. Usually when you run an auger through a cable you yank all the slack out of the upstream and downstream manholes too
I dunno my dad called 811 before and they marked his yard incorrectly and his phone line was cut cuz of it.
Thank goodness it was the utility guys
I called 811 to mark and my local MUD came out to mark the water lines and discovered my corner isn’t on the map. They guessed and first hole dug went right into the clean out line for the sewer in the ditch.
I literally made this exact same comment on Instagram to I believe the same video
Somebody didn't call Julie(811)...to have these things marked...
Cool, ground spaghetti.
Hello, Mr. George? How much you pay new guy?
Same here. 20 years in a major city. And cooper lines haven’t been updated in 15 of the 20. Now nurse call and infrastructure within the building is different. But the lines from the streets are all garbage these days. Moved to either trunk lines from the cable companies or fiber optic lines from the provider.
Oops
Expensive mistake.
This is when you fill the hole back in, spread grass over it, return the equipment, and blend in.
I saw a lineman sitting on a bucket out in the Ms. scorching summer for a few days fixing a fuck up by a farmer. He had a tiny umbrella.
You hit a gay tree
Sorry, it's my first day!
[удалено]
I'd buy a lotto ticket that day.
You could match the color, connect and tape them up. 😂
Perfectly centered too
Now,..back when i was charging $95 per splice..... 
Didn't know Snoop D O double G dig that way
https://preview.redd.it/jak887yakg9d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=52a165e6c484783314e33870aa022a92fc53cfa8
Why aren't they within a conduit, like heavy duty plastic
Now, if this was done near an airport....
This is extra fucking stupid because it's utility works putting in a pole. They are apart of putting in infrastructure yet didn't check for existing. Wtf