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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

When they say 10k miles, do they mean 10k miles of land or of cable? Asking because my military unit used individual cables to exaggerate numbers. i.e. 6 strands at 1 mile would become "6 miles of cable run". Either way, great they are doing this. I hope they prevent some fires and save some lives.

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Reminds me of a story a colleague told me, from his early job working in tech support call center for a phone company.

He recounts of an issue with a customer complaining about low Internet speeds, despite being located close to the distribution building for the whole area. Seemingly, everything should've been fine. A cable leaves the distribution building, goes into the ground, and reappears a short distance later near the customer's house. Upon close inspection it was discovered that the cable did not take a straight route underground - instead of cutting the cable to necessary length, someone just buried the entire spool, and the total cable length was close to a kilometer or so. The signal, unboosted, barely got through to the other end.

Ohmuhgawd, this is so bizzare. That cable is not free, and wasting that much of it was surely to get noticed, wouldn't it? Questions, so many questions. Was this a contractor sticking to the man by wasting all of that cable? Was it someone trying to earn points for how much cable they "installed" that month? Wouldn't it be more financially beneficial to cut the cable as normal, and then sell of the spool to a scrapper or other used cable place? Was this a team of people that all agreed this would be a bad idea?

So sounds like a movie plot

My guess is too lazy to cut and re-terminate the cable.

Ordinary cable installation does not dig a hole big enough for a spool to fit. They tend to dig trenches just wide enough for what they are burying. They would have had to have done so much extra work for that.

Just lends itself to the story possibly being an urban legend.

The things I've seen 'round here in the telecom boxes and fiber concentrators... It's a miracle anything works at all...

In the early days of consumer DSL, I had really, really bad service and I kept calling to complain and the phone company kept saying they found nothing wrong. Finally they must have gotten tired of me calling and they sent someone competent. He traced my phone cable all the way back to the box a couple blocks away then came back to tell me that he found the problem. One of the wires in the pair was not actually screwed down (or punched down, IDK): it was just touching the terminal. So some of the time it worked just fine, but I'm guessing that if a big truck or something drove by, the vibration separated the connection, and my DSL would go all to hell.

His guess was that (a) nobody bothered looking in the box and (b) they were just testing voice quality, which was fine, but the actual DSL signal was showing lots of dropouts.

Maybe the install department had extra budget to waste before the end of the year, so it wouldn't be cut next year.

It’s a typical non-disclosed denominator issue.

As mentioned in the NPR story, it's about 10% of their distribution and transmission lines.

"Last night I moved 60 trillion meters of DNA downstairs to get a drink. I was thirsty."

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