Internet down in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., after beaver chews through fibre cable | Hacker News Reader

Internet down in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., after beaver chews through fibre cable

cbc.ca

328 pointsbarbazoo142 comments

It may surprise some of you (well, it surprised me when I looked it up) that transatlantic cables are only about 25mm in diameter. I personally thought they would have a bigger cross section, but 25mm is all it takes to get a country's worth of data across the pond.

This also means that cutting through them is not particularly difficult. I think at one point a lot of the UK was without internet because a shark chewed through one (or a ship managed to cut through it).

They are still armored cables wrapped in galvanized steel wires though. Also the spans in shallower waters generally have two layers of steel wire. See:

https://twistedsifter.com/2012/07/the-undersea-cables-that-c...

No cable is going to be a match for a ship's anchor dropping on it or a fishing trawler dragging it but saying cutting through them is "not difficult" is not correct. You couldn't cut through them with a pair of wire cutters. They are also powered spans with 10 kV DC at both ends. So it could also potentially kill you. Anchors and trawling nets are by far the most common reasons for cable faults. Sharks chewing through them however is not common. Although it's certainly a more entertaining image. See:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2872728/dont-blame-sha...

Or this guy that picked up a submarine cable in his crabfishing net and cut it, not once, but twice with a circular saw:

https://www.canliiconnects.org/en/commentaries/35843

The actual fiber data cables are just like any other, super thin like a human hair. 5 to 10 microns in diameter for the core of a single-mode fiber strand which is used for long distances. They can carry hundreds of gigabits per second. It's not so much the fibers that allow this: the cables don't need to be replaced to increase capacity; the physics behind the cables doesn't really change, they just carry pulses of light. It's the equipment modulating the signal on both sides that is upgraded to allow for increasingly higher bandwidth.

Any of the thickness past those few microns is just shielding.

Beavers have been making a comeback to downtown Vancouver after a 60 years hiatus. They've been milling about Stanley Park (a major park beside downtown) and set up dens in the park's river system.

https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/animals/beavers-stanley-p...

Beavers are extremely cool. Being Canadian, I never gave them very much thought until the youtube algorithm one day had me watching a documentary about them, that lead to me searching out another documentary to watch about them because they're so fascinating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyBZ1mdg2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N15sLwRCmnc

My parents have been having a kind of entertaining saga with the beavers that have colonized their rural property in Alberta. It's 100+ acres of bush neighbouring forested crown land, and it had been logged out and abused a bit before they moved there and built their house. So they've spent the last decade and a half restoring it.

In the low lying portion of their land there was always a gully with a tiny little trickle of water, a bit marshy, but no creek or pond. Enough you could step over it, that's it.

Fast forward 15 years and it's now a full pond with a beaver dam and at least one lodge and the water is now so high they can't get to the other half of their property. My dad builds bridges but the beavers keep raising the water level. He builds what he thinks are beaver-proof culverts to lower the water level a bit (but still enough for the beavers), and it works for a couple years and then eventually the beavers figure it out.

Unfortunately it has gotten to the point where he may have to do a bit of population control on them, as they are getting beyond destructive and he's getting older. He tried to live in harmony with them, but it's gotten tricky. Luckily their house is well up on the hill but they do want to be able to get to the other half of their property.

Props to your folks for restoring damaged land.

When I was in Canada I was talking to farmers who routinely trapped beavers and blew up their damns with dynamite. Otherwise they'd flood huge swaths of farmland.

In rural Latvia, people will shoot them and eat the meat.

I completely agree!

Beavers make habitats! They create entire ecosystems! They turn semi-arid land into lush wetlands. Their lodges become homes for muskrats and otters. The wetlands they make support bird, and frog, and fish populations.

California used to have hundreds of thousands of them. The now-semiarid Central Valley looked very different before humans started trapping them in masse, and dammed rivers in the Sierras. I wish I could go back in time and see central California circa 1700. I sometimes wonder if we could restore some of what we lost.

Yeah, beavers are one of the few animals like us who toil to adapt their habitat to themselves instead of just accepting it.

I've also heard that beavers can't stand the sound of running water, and if you put speakers playing running water in their lodge, they will go to great effort to try and find and dam it. I don't know if that's true, but it seems plausible.

According to wiki, you're pretty right.

> The sound of running water appears to stimulate dam-building, and the sound of a leak in a dam triggers them to repair it. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver#Infrastructure

Reminds me of human's proclivity to fashion pointy sticks first chance they get.

I heard if you lock a human in a room with a rock and stick, they'll make a pointy stick. I don't know if that's true, but it seems plausible.

Sorry, I had to ;)

They want to repair the captivity, should be studied further

The doc I posted is actually in part about how they react to the sound of running water, and they show the exact speaker experiment you mentioned. :)

I was looking for the (cbc?) story of a farmer in Alberta or Saskatchewan who was attracting beavers by this very method to reintroduce them to the environment, but I didn’t find it. Might have been CBC Ideas[0]. I’ll have to leave it as an exercise for the reader.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas

Edit: I think it may have been this episode, but I can’t find audio for it: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/rethinking-the-beaver-why-bea...

> Beavers make habitats! They create entire ecosystems! They turn semi-arid land into lush wetlands. Their lodges become homes for muskrats and otters. The wetlands they make support bird, and frog, and fish populations.

Species that have such major effects on their ecosystem are called keystone species [1]. Beavers are one of the more visible examples.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species

Beavers are a very special type of keystone species, which is what the GP is getting at. Sea stars and wolves, for example, are keystone species in many habitats because they control herbivore populations but that impact pales in comparison to habitat building animals like reef-building corals or beavers.

> I sometimes wonder if we could restore some of what we lost.

We absolutely could; we could make this entire planet a garden if we chose. We simply lack the will.

I know you're using "garden" in a somewhat hyperbolic sense here, but I have to say that I've never particularly liked that framing; I think it implies a degree of control/domesticity over the natural environment that doesn't quite sit well with me, compared to other terms for the same process like "re-wilding", etc.

Most people would prefer parks and gardens over inaccessible wildlands.

Most people have not ever experienced such a wildland. And majority of these are in fact accessible, just not with vehicles.

Humans aren’t the only type of animal. Wildlands are preferred by many animals.

They are doing their best to be the only type of animal.

A lot of people would be willing. The people with power and contradicting interests don't.

I never heard of this before. Thanks for sharing. Any good sources? And do you know of any efforts to reintroduce beavers into parts of California?

I am no ecosystem expert, but in particular I recall reading that the lakes they create are essential for migratory water birds.

On a related note, there's a book called Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter[1] that I read over the holidays that goes really into detail about the animals and their effect on the world around them. Really great read, and I'm really excited/hopeful to see them spread into more areas and do their thing, despite the occasional "mischief" they seem to get into.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39345591-eager

There's a beaver dam near my cottage in Ontario. We pull it apart on occasion as it risks the road. But they build it back up impressively fast.

I've always found them a bit of an annoyance! Algonquin Park is full of them and they make some of the backcountry routes difficult by changing water levels through it. The amount of beaver dams I have pulled my canoe over!

Thank you very much for the links. I have learned so much in 45 minutes.

What are the odds that [insert your favorite boogeyman global power] has already seeded every submarine communications cable with "robotic beavers", patiently awaiting an activation signal? It is frightening how fragile the physical security of global networks appears to be.

> It is frightening how fragile the physical security of global networks appears to be.

Protecting miles and miles of cable running through the wilderness is an herculean task, especially since usually nobody attempts to attack it. One can of course do a three-way fallback of landline/direct radio link/satellite, but that would be insane cost for, again, basically no benefit and no bandwidth.

Two fiber lines is really the best thing you're going to get if you want good and fast internet speeds at reasonable prices.

> especially since usually nobody attempts to attack it.

Don’t tell the folks at UMN, they’ll look at it and think, “OMG! It would be so easy to cut with an axe. Such a massive security vulnerability. Bet I could write a paper about this. Where’s my axe?”

Unless you opt for SpaceX's Starlink. Still expensive, but bandwidth is usually better than without it in remote regions.

Well, yes. Current satellite is pretty awful by all accounts. And many places (like my house 40 miles outside of Boston) don't get great cellular reception--which has effective bandwidth caps in any case. In those situations, StarLink looks like a pretty good option, such as at my dad's house where he had 1 Mbps DSL.

But probably not so great for the crowd that thinks they can't live without 1 Gbps and TBs of data/month.

Yes and no. Starlink is definitely a solution for very small village or remote cabins, but economy of scale kicks in pretty fast.

Doing napkin math, the village has 2k people, so let's assume 400 households. If each of those wants 100 Mbit/s, we'd need a 40 Gbit/s link. Maybe 10 Gbit/s with over-provisioning. So that's basically a satellite only for this village. Not to mention that satellites have their own set of vulnerabilities.

Probably easier to just lay a redundant fiber liner and use star link for emergencies, in case the robotic beavers take over :)

I won't disagree that the physical security of the last mile is quite fragile, but I'm not sure the same holds true for the global Internet.

There's no single topology of the Internet, but if I had to try and sum it up: it approaches a mesh at the core, and approaches a star at the edge. Backbones peer with thousands of providers; businesses may have a primary and backup ISP; home users are lucky to even have a second ISP offering service in their area.

> Robotic Beavers

> Cut submarine cables

You don’t need any of that to break havoc on the internet. Just use BGP to advertise bogus routes to any prefixes.

How are you gonna train the beavers to advertise bogus BGP routes?

If we can demonstrate to the beavers that BGP blocks running water, they may train themselves.

Injecting training data into the brain

https://mobile.twitter.com/axios/status/1382696186684014592

BGP from where? Hijacking for any extended period of time is a good way to get dropped by your peers.

The average outage from these fiber cuts is orders of magnitude longer than the most catastrophic bgp hijacks.

That's something that can be cleaned up much faster though.

Can we just have a chuckle about a humorous event for once, without someone introducing fear?

I sort of assume there's lots of stuff like this that exists and people constantly bringing it up at every opportunity is kind of tiring. The converse where "everyone knows" but doesn't acknowledge it isn't necessarily any better though.

Anyways, the mental image of robot beaver drones with glowing red eyes causing havoc makes up for it.

Likely every global power has the maps and the tools to do it, but doing it would not be very useful unless it's a part of some kind of terror campaign. Military equipment that needs communications likely can operate over the air, or has some internal networking - it's not like they're usually deployed next to major network exchanges. You can cause some inconvenience, even panic, maybe even stock market crash - but any over hostile action from a major power would do that anyway just by the fact it happens.

> fragile the physical security of global networks

The easiest way to defeat a burglar alarm is with an axe through the power/communication cable.

(A better system has a battery backup and uses the cellular network, but the latter is expensive and has bandwidth problems.)

Couldn’t they just restrict the communication on that cable at one of the buildings on either end of the cable? Seems likely that they’d still want to use the cable for some approved communications and would have no trouble controlling things without resort to a robotic cable-chewer.

This is so that country A can prevent communications between country B and country C in case of war.

I'm not sure it is an especially valuable war tactic, because while you can probably take out some cat videos for a few hours, serious military and political communications will be redirected over satellite links quite quickly.

Sure, in a total war situation I suppose cutting all long-distance communications would obviously be on the table. But it wouldn’t be up there on my list of concerns, cuz nukes and stuff.

I’d see it as a larger concern in the context of terrorism or very asymmetric warfare.

> It is frightening how fragile the physical security of global networks appears to be.

Is it? I have access pretty much all the time and can’t name an outage (that wasn’t caused by me), ever.

When something gets broken somewhere, presumably my data gets routed around the issue.

> Is it? I have access pretty much all the time and can’t name an outage (that wasn’t caused by me), ever.

I think that's because the system is designed to be resilient to random failures (e.g., disgruntled beaver). Submarine cables fail all the time and there are repair boats constantly fixing breakages caused by fishing, wildlife, etc.

All of the submarine cables failing at the same time (e.g., terrorist beavers) is most definitely not a random failure and would, I suspect, cause some proper havoc and take months to fix.

It blows my mind that you've never once had an internet outage. This is like a monthly to weekly occurrence for me.

With crap ADSL I had plenty of times where it got slow, and painfully so (1-2mbps). Now that it’s all fibre it’s been rock solid.

Masses of investment went into the fibre roll out here in New Zealand and the limiting thing now seems to be the connection to the wider world and the distances involved.

2gbps and 4gbps plans are available, but while attractive, I don’t use all my 1gbps plan and struggle to think of a home use that would. The home infrastructure required would also be significant.

Perhaps we should be more afraid of the connection being there than it not being there.

Gentle reminder that multiple countries around the world have almost accidentally started a nuclear holocaust. I'm not that bothered by Netflix going down.

For what it's worth, that's exactly why it seems like something that is likely to actually happen.

It's one thing to threaten mutual nuclear destruction and quite another to give the order to actually kill hundreds of millions of people and almost certainly end or ruin your own life. Since that basically excludes any intentional act by a moral or rational actor, my understanding is that the closest calls were usually cases of mistaken intent.

A global internet outage would be devastating for economic and possibly humanitarian reasons, but would not have the degree of practical and moral deterrence that exists for nuclear weapons.

Friendly reminder that it's a lot easier to be talked into hating an "other" when there's no ability to communicate and only the agitators on either side get heard.

Hi, I am a beaver.AMA

How do you avoid cavities?

I eat no added sugar whatsoever. Only what's in the bark of a tree.

if nine out of ten dentists recommend a specific toothpaste, do you agree with them?

Hey walrus01, short answer is - no. You should always do your homework and check it by yourself. Anyway, I am not at the dentist very often.

will you donate your fur to science after you die?

Probably - yes.

I lived and worked in Tumbler Ridge for about six years in the 80s and 90s. I never expected to see it on the Hacker News. Too funny!

It is a beautiful place to go hiking. You probably remember kinuseo Falls and the monkman cascades? The area is now a UNESCO Global Geopark.

Yes! When I lived there, there was no bridge to Kinuseo, so you had to drive through the Murray. I crossed with a friend who had a lifted Dodge 4x4. It was more than a little un-nerving to have water starting to fill the cab...

The other thing I remember is that the Conservation Service used to catch poachers up in that area with "robot" deer (IIRC, the extent of the automation was that the heads turned).

This makes me inexplicably happy. For whatever reason, any story about wild animals wreaking havoc on our fiddly human contrivances is incredibly amusing. I'm sure there's a literary or philosophical term that captures this feeling. This applies doubly so for beavers. I can't quite put my finger on the reason for that; maybe it's because they're so busy and determined, to the extent that all their accidental floodings and property destruction feel entirely intentional and premeditated.

It makes me think of the recent "Nature is healing" memes (sometimes "Nature is healing, we are the virus"), i.e. Nature is taking back what humans assumed was theirs to keep.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/coronavi...

I agree that the "cute/relentless" combo of beavers is quite comical..! See:

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/beavers-continue-relentless-...

>a Canadian- made steel trap, pulling it out of the water

even at this day and age we're still doing that cruelty of subjecting the animals to the hours/days long medieval torture.

It makes me think of how anti-human, self-hatred focused (all notions that humans are a virus derive from self-hatred first, without exception), and irrational those memes are, since humans are nature. Anything we do and anything we build, is nature in action.

Given how thoroughly humanity has polluted this planet seemingly entirely for its own selfish gain, surely from the perspective of “nature” the extinction of humanity would be no great loss.

> Anything we do and anything we build, is nature in action.

“It’s comin’ right for us!”

We have the Oxygen Catastrophe and the Azolla Event as real-world examples of life killing off a lot of other life.

Humans are the first biosphere-changing organism that can actually think about what we do, and maybe not go off the deep end.

I think humanity's efforts to do so, as imperfect as they are, are worthy of praise.

> Humans are the first biosphere-changing organism that can actually think about what we do, and maybe not go off the deep end.

Maybe not go off the deep end? David Attenborough would like to have a word [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough:_A_Life_on_...

I wonder if it coincides with antinatalist attitudes.

What kind of adversary is mother nature expecting that she would spawn such monstrosities? It seems like the most serious case of paranoia. I feel like a means of mass producing bad ideas now.

perhaps not the precise term, but "wabi-sabi" comes to mind; something like the beauty of nature, the impermanence of things, and decay; i.e., an appreciation of nature's tendency towards maximal entropy. also the phrase, "the best laid plans of mice and men."

I think that's very close, thank you.

This reminds me of my neighbour’s recent problem with his fibre (to the premises) broadband here in the UK. After losing internet connectivity, he eventually managed to get a BT Openreach engineer out only to discover the overhead cables had been chewed through presumably by a grey squirrel. Apparently they have a taste for something in the outer casing..

> I'm sure there's a literary or philosophical term that captures this feeling.

It's not 100% that, but "schadenfreude" comes close.

Most of humanity, for most of our existence, have been and are "busy and determined" though.

It's easy to forget, but we really should not.

I have to admit "happy" was not a word I expected to see in this thread.

Of course, being a cute and silly looking creature doesn't hurt either

This will probably be the most Canadian thing you'll read all day.

Maple Syrup (sorry)

Add it to the list... https://cybersquirrel1.com/

Reminds me about the whale getting caught in an undersea cable a few years back (with some stunning photos): https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23231000-400-hacker-t...

I never thought I would see this place mentioned on HN. It is a fairly quiet place way up in British Columbia. When I was there a long time ago they had a nice self-contained town with skating/hockey rink, a Mountie station, a couple of streets through the middle of town with shopping for all the essentials, and gas stations and clubs near the outside of town. We would hit up that club that had beer, billiards, and karaoke for fun when we'd get the occasional chance to go into town.

I worked on a drilling rig outside of town on the side of a mountain above timberline. It was beautiful country, absolutely fantastic. When I got there I thought about what a waste it was to be drilling in such a beautiful place with all the desolate places still available on earth and no guaranteed payout due to complex geology.

Native wildlife wandered by camp and the location daily. Back then Canada really led the way with their environmental protections. All water related to drilling had to be contained on the location within a berm large enough to prevent escape. Vacuum trucks ran all day if necessary and when it did rain it was a 24 hour a day job until the location was clear of pooled water that could escape into the clear creeks in the area. Solids control (handling drill cuttings) involved collection and compression of cuttings to remove fluids which were then chemically treated to restore their properties for reuse in drilling while the cuttings were pelletized for shipment offsite. I had never seen that in the US. They clearly had a commitment to environmental protection.

Years later the Harper government came in and eliminated some of those protections to favor production, especially of their vast oil sands resources.

When I was in college, those oil sands were given as an example of one of the largest petroleum deposits on earth. The case was made that they would never fully be developed since the oil had lost all the lighter fraction and it was necessary to inject steam to recover from most of the sands. This was an expensive process wasting and polluting huge quantities of water, but it was also something that would forever destroy a huge region and render the water undrinkable. The projection back then was that it would take sustained $80/bbl oil for it to be economical since the process was so expensive.

Fast forward a couple decades and everything has ramped up due to oil price increases driven largely by a switch from demand pricing in the markets to speculative pricing and you see the resulting devastation they have wrought on the area.

Pretty sad. I hate that my career has enabled bullshit like this. All those places I visited and came to love have been destroyed by an industry full of liars who value integrity only when it involves keeping an industry secret and encourage the opposite when the truth could cause your business model financial problems.

Tumbler Ridge has some really nice waterfalls nearby if you ever visit and it is not far from other places worth seeing. I took all the time when I should've been in camp sleeping for the next tour (shift) and drove out to Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Fort St John and other places so I could see things that I felt I would never again have the opportunity to see. I saw the color change from summer to fall colors as it spread across the landscape, watched trees lose their leaves, felt the first unexpected snowfall as it buried our gear under 3 feet of fresh snow, I jumped off a snow cornice and slid down the side of the mountain on my chest using my feet as steering so I could dodge all the obvious rocks. I watched a grizzly walk down the same valley I had just crossed and pause to sniff the wind when he caught my trail.

I know they'll get the problem fixed. This just brought back so much.

Thank you for sharing!

Great headline. This should top the reigning champ of famous headlines about Canada - "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative"[1].

1- https://parli.ca/worthwhile-canadian-initiative/

The most fascinating fact about this is that this northern B.C. community has a fibre optic link. I live 5 minutes from town in Ontario in one of the highest populated metro regions in the world and I don't even have DSL.

Rural and semi-rural BC have fibre whereas most of Vancouver doesn't; it's a quirk of circumstance, really. They replaced rural copper lines with fibre and just went fibre to the door, whereas urban copper is resilient and competes with cable internet; and it's expensive to run fibre into appartment buildings after they've been built. Access availability in remote areas was mandated by the CRTC.

I lived outside of Nanaimo and we had cable internet in 1996, before Quake was released! Much of the mainland didn't get cable until a little while later.

You'd be suffering from the last mile [1] problem. Tumbler Ridge likely got the fibre connection due to some industrial/govt user (the museum? the former mine? the archaelogists?), and delivering fibre to other households would be a weeks work which might just make sense to do while the crews are already out there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile

There's fibre all over rural/semi-rural BC; internet access was mandated by the regulator, and the old copper lines needed replacing, so Telus went fibre to the door.

How can they tell where is the cable damage? If the cable is all underground, surely they didn’t dig up the whole thing? Can they measure that from one end? Do they do a binary search by digging and testing?

If you want to understand how TDR works, watch this classic tutorial from the mid-50s in the AT&T archive. The first 5 minutes, showing the reflection of an open and short circuit is enough.

* AT&T Archives: Similiarities of Wave Behavior

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DovunOxlY1k

Many are surprised when they learned that it's possible to detect the location of a break in the mains wiring or an Ethernet cable, just by doing an electrical test from one end of the cable (some Ethernet cards even have builtin TDR support!). There's no closed loop, why is it possible to test anything electrically? Because at high frequency, the circuit becomes an electromagnetic waveguide.

Basically like a radar, you send a fast electrical or optical pulse to the electrical cable or the optical fiber, the EM wave travels along the cable until it hits the break and reflects back. You record the time and listen for the echo. All discontinuities (such as damages) on the line will reflect and distort the original pulse. Use the speed of light to pinpoint the location of the fault.

OTDR - optical time domain reflectometer, you connect it to the fiber at one end and it'll tell you where the break is, accurate to plus or minus 20-30 meters

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_time-domain_reflecto...

The largest known beaver dam in the world resides in the neighboring province and stretches over half a mile (0.85 km) in length [1]. It is so large and remote that it was only discovered by satellite image in 2007 [2].

[1]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/worlds-largest-beaver-da...

[2]: https://www.mensjournal.com/travel/explorer-first-reach-worl...

This happens with cars pretty frequently too, though usually with squirrels. They get in and chew up the wiring harness under the hood. It's crazy expensive to fix because it's not always clear where all the damage is, and access often requires disassembling tons of stuff in the engine bay.

The Bugaboos in Eastern BC are well known for having rubber-eating porcupines. Standard practice when leaving a car at the trailhead for a while is to wrap the underside in chickenwire.

https://www.mountainproject.com/photo/105869551/porcupine-ba...

The car wires are because people started using insulation out of peanut, soy, and rice husks. Good example of something that seemed superficially good for the environment but had unforeseen consequences. I'm not advocating for asbestos here, but there are certainly non-edible, noxious alternatives.

Had exactly this happen to my Fit. Can confirm it was an expensive fix, increasing TCO of the car by a significant percentage since it wasn’t a very expensive car to begin with. I can only hope the squirrel enjoyed their $1,000 lunch.

Our overhead utility lines (broadband) run through some woods. Squirrels routinely nibble on them, and then blame the damage on the wind.

Some rabbits got my car earlier this spring in the driveway. The price to fix wasn't astronomical, but luckily their little nest was quite visible once they jacked the car up. The wires they chewed were close to that.

This just happened (again) to my car recently, and threw off all of the electronic sensors in the car. I'm considering some well-placed .22 shots to take the nuisances out, because the fixes are absurdly costly.

Mice too.

There was an interesting lawsuit a while ago about how newer cars use a plastic for the wire insulation that's alledgedly more attractive to rodents, although I don't recall the outcome.

I wonder if the beaver was ok afterwards.

His beaver doctor will be pleased with such healthy fiber intake.

Nah, he wasn't, he felt pretty bad about the whole ordeal.

At least it was a non electrocuting fiber cable

... a photo from the site appeared to show the beavers using Telus materials to build their home ...

LOL surviving beaver's in 2021. At first I thought this was a joke, but no... beaver's are getting smarter.

I want to write a satirical short story about a total global collapse for the silliest reason possible and would absolutely love to use a premise as ridiculous as a beaver taking down the internet.

You could always go for a more Stephen King plot involving an evil old tv https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/09/18-months-of-v...

who made who / maximum overdrive. Amazing.

What if you tied in the Suez stuck ship somehow...

Reading this, my first thought really was that some Telus outside plant fiber crews (and possibly contracted trenching or directional boring contractor) are about to make a lot of overtime.

Definitely espionage by Bell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBahTTB-sPI

After everyone had politely to apologized to each other, and to the Beaver, they had a few Nanaimo Bars and all was well.

My first reading thought it would be an imagined Tumblr page involving beavers if Tumblr existed in BC times

Someone might add "beaver" as a suitable diversion for their covert fiber tap mission.

Less sexy headline: “Internet down in Canadian village due to poor planning and lack of proper redundancy”

It's not exactly unexpected the last mile cable for a small village to have no redundancy. The redundancy is: use your cellular connection until they fix the cable.

The story says that cell service is also down.

The same cable was used for cell service...

Not sure why you’re downvoted - the article says “Telus warns that cellphone service in the area is likely to be spotty until the cable is repaired.” Maybe the cellular outage is from more people using it rather than damage?

It's a tiny town with only a few road routes in and out. Now go do the budget in dollars per km to build a fully redundant ring topology of fiber, via diverse routing, to the nearest mid size city. Lots of rural places are effectively a singlehomed stub, and you take your chances with a flash flood washing out a conduit alongside a road, trees falling on lines, beavers, etc.

It's a tiny, dying mining town over 50 miles away from the closest community. Having fibre is amazing as it is.

I take it that B. C. means "beavers chewing", then?

busky beaver used to be the world’s most famous beaver, & world’s third favorite rodent, second only to mickey and rocky, that dear friend of bullwinkle.

busky beaver used to attract hundreds of thousands of annual tourists & visitors to the river.

- the dams it built ~ - the stick stacking ~ throughout canada, renowned & amounted to some of the biggest, most ferocious, meticulous ordered N precision-stacked on the banks, all around

- but in the 90s, - in the 2000s, slowly, annual visitors were dwindling

“wtf?”

said busky.

for the beaver was at the top of it’s game, & no ordinary thing could explain what was happening.

the consensus, however, was overall positive.

“more forest for me”

was the essence of forest-animal conversation,

but busky beaver wasn’t happy.

“what about BC’s nature-derived GDP?”

fact is busky was a top earner for the industry. had woodpecker pecked plaques & everything & didn’t like no-one - neither beaver nor techie - biting into his bottom line ..

by & by, birds in the trees, tweeted talks of some internet thing.

absorbing attn. keeping tourists, netflixed comfy on homefront.

“well busky being busky wasn’t just going to let things slide ..”

“this requires adventure of a different kind.”

& so it t’was, busky said:

“i’m going to find the internet & stop it.”

forest heard that. talk pinged. honey badgers scoffed loudly

“you can’t stop the internet!” said honey bader “It’s everywhere!”

“Why don’t you help me?”

but honey badger don’t care.

well neither did busky.

and so it goes, busky just went ahead, adventured out there.

- days passed, - months followed, - busky trekkin,

combing through the forest for internet, asking questions, turning up nothing

“wheretf is it?”

long story cut short,

encounters happened,. trying times & tribulation .. tests vanquished, all passed, but all the same.

nonetheless, no trace of internet. and so it goes, busky went all across canada, through alaska, reached china, crossed russia, ended up back in canada.

“wtf?!”

it’d been years hence but suddenly, busky was back at his home dam.

& some m th r f ck r z had laid fiber optics across it?

“fk that.”

busky had beaver mouth, could back his own talk when it came to chewing. & so, busky cut through the fiber optics, in minutes. next thing, WWW in BC, went bust.

and eventually birdys got word, talk traveled.

happenstance cut fast,

woodpecker pecked plaque but the lumberjacks are coming

tbc .. (potentially)

//* when you seek a teacher, one will show up next door; (something like that)

also – not edited / just quick “flash” written.

love hacker news / hope you enjoyed */

It’s a 3-day galactic space journey!

I got a txt message from my friend about this wholives there. Was surprised that they have cell reception.

Great, now we have to start taking beavers into account too. Squirrels were a known cyber threat: https://cybersquirrel1.com/

From some quick searching it seems like this isn’t very uncommon, with animals like gophers, squirrels, rats, and more cutting cables all over the world: https://www.rdm.com/rodents-the-biggest-threat-to-fiber-acce...

I went to war with a mouse who was attacking the Ethernet cables in the wall near my IT cupboard each night.

Listening to it chomping away was anxiety inducing. Pics Peanut Butter turned out to be the perfect bait.

https://www.picspeanutbutter.com

>it appears the beavers dug underground alongside the creek to reach our cable, which is buried about three feet underground and protected by a 4.5-inch thick conduit. The beavers first chewed through the conduit before chewing through the cable in multiple locations,"

sounds very determined, and i wonder what caused that beaver's rage against the machine.

I hope that beaver can chew through all fiber cables in the world and people go outside and live more and communicate in person again. Good job beaver.

Meanwhile in real world we've still got a pandemic going on and the internet allows us to communicate more.

Meanwhile people are going outside more because of the pandemic. So much for lockdowns.

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