 |
|
 |
AT&T offers USD100,000 for fibre optic cable vandals
|
11 April 2009 |
| |
AT&T has pledged a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of vandals who cut underground fiber-optic telephone and Internet cable lines April 9. The felony vandalism disrupted service to tens of thousands of people in five Northern California counties.
Portions of the city and county of San Francisco and the counties of San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito, where a number of IT companies are located, were affected.
AT&T, Verizon and Sprint Nextel land-line, cellular and Internet service was down in those areas beginning at about 2 a.m. April 9, when four underground fiber-optic cables belonging to AT&T and Verizon were cut. The cables were located 10 feet down a manhole.
Both the Verizon and Sprint wireless services rely on the AT&T lines to carry their phone traffic back to their networks.
In San Carlos, about 25 miles north of the south San Jose vandalism site, lines belonging to Sprint and Verizon were disabled at about 3:30 a.m. PDT, a San Carlos police spokesperson said. However, no reports of telecom outages were reported to City Hall in neighboring Redwood City, city spokesperson Malcolm Smith told eWEEK.
The Santa Clara County Office of Emergency Services said the outage killed cell phones and Internet access and about 52,000 Verizon household land lines in south Santa Clara County and Santa Cruz County for the entire day.
Calls by eWEEK to the land lines of several corporate offices of IT companies, including IBM, Apple and Hewlett-Packard in Cupertino, were met with a recorded phone company message: "Your call cannot be completed as entered. Please try the number again." Other calls elicited a fast busy signal or nothing at all.
AT&T said at about 3:30 p.m. on its Twitter news site, "We anticipate some service restoration will begin in next few hours, with repair and rerouting efforts continuing this afternoon." Later in the day the company said it expected all lines to be reconnected and operational by about 9 p.m.
The telecom company announced the $100,000 reward via the same news outlet at about 2:45 p.m. AT&T asked people with information on the crimes to call (408) 947-STOP.
John Britton, a spokesperson for AT&T, told the San Francisco Chronicle, "Clearly, we have some vandalism. Someone purposefully and deliberately cut the wires."
Britton told the newspaper that the four cables that were cut in San Jose were about the width of a silver dollar and were encased in tough plastic sheath. In both instances, Britton said, saboteurs must have been equipped with heavy-duty cutting equipment to slice through the thick cable coating.
It is possible that the vandalism is connected with a labor dispute, although there was no confirmation of this by Bay Area authorities on April 9. About 110,000 AT&T workers nationwide have considered going on strike, according to TMCnet.com, a news site for the telecommunications industry.
Five regional union contracts expired on Sunday, April 5. A sixth that expires a few months later is being negotiated at the same time, the site reported.
The major disagreement between AT&T and the Communications Workers of America has been increased health-care costs.
|
Found this article interesting? Click the envelope below to email it to a friend!
 |
Original Article Link: |
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/VOIP-and-Telephony/ATT-Offers-100000-Reward-for-Conviction-of-Bay-Area-Telecom-Vandals-437552/
|
| |
Recent International News Articles |
Spin, iiNet, TPG and Primus are among the ISPs that have recently announced plans offering at least one terabyte of data per month. Others, such as Optus, have for some time offered 'unlimited' plans that are subject to speed limiting after the quota is reached. But something all these have in common is that they differentiate between peak and off-peak use, with a portion - perhaps the majority - of the quota being restricted to the small hours. Optus has a relatively generous definition of off-peak... | Vodafone has announced its 4G roll-out for Germany, though it seems it'll be Americans making the first 4G phone call. Vodafone Germany will have LTE coverage in 1,000 municipalities by Christmas, and Vodafone promises a national network by the end of 2011. That will be a data network using dongles for connecting laptops, in common with other LTE roll-outs, so it seems America's metroPCS will be the first to launch a 4G phone network over which customers will make phone calls. Long Term Evolution is the 4G... | Customers of Orange and T-Mobile will soon be able to hop between the two mobile networks. The deal is one of the first practical benefits from the recent merger of the two firms, which have 30 million customers combined. The network sharing deal is limited to 2G signals, meaning that customers will see little benefit when using the mobile web. Analysts said that T-Mobile had the most to gain from the merger. "Outside of the South-East [of England] there has been a constant perception that T-Mobile is... | Broadband pricing in Europe and the US fell EUR5 a month, on average, as broadband speeds went up by an average of 20 per cent during the last year, says researcher Analysys Mason. This is after a relatively flat period during the past recession, when prices held up. Now the average price paid for a fixed broadband service bundle, which includes any single service or double and triple play bundles, has come down to EUR40.7 a month. Analysys Mason says that it tracks over 1000 fixed broadband-based bundles ... | The global disparity in fixed broadband access and cost has been revealed by UN figures. The Central African Republic is the most expensive place to get a fixed broadband connection, costing nearly 40 times the average monthly income there. Macao in China is the cheapest, costing 0.3% of the average monthly income. Niger becomes the most expensive place to access communication technologies, when landlines and mobiles are also taken into account. "Access to broadband in an affordable manner is our greatest... | Mobile phone operator Safaricom Limited has ruled out any tariff reductions on its voice and short message service (SMS) services, even as shareholders pile pressure on the company to do so to match the competition. "We need a balanced response to the ongoing price war in the mobile phone market to safeguard our revenues, margins and subscriber numbers," Michael Joseph, Safaricom CEO, told the firm's shareholders at the company's Annual General Meeting (AGM), held yesterday at the Bomas of Kenya. Safaricom... | Mobile firm Orange has become the first UK network to use a technology that offers higher quality voice calls. High Definition (HD) voice claims to reduce background noise and the "hisses and crackles" often heard on a normal mobile call. The technology, known as, Adaptive Multi Rate Wideband (AMR-WB) has been adopted as an international standard for 3G mobile networks. Other networks are expected to follow Orange soon, experts said. "It is relatively easy for an operator to introduce - it's just a software... | T-Mobile USA said Tuesday afternoon that it will increase the maximum possible data speeds offered on its upgraded 3G network to 42 Mbit/s in 2011. The fourth-ranked mobile operator in the US has been upgrading its GSM-based 3G network with a high-speed packet access plus (HSPA+) software update for months now. Upgraded markets offer a theoretical peak download speed of 21 Mbit/s. The operator has previously said that this translates into average download speeds in the 5-to-8-Mbit/s range using its HSPA+... | The Federal Communications Commission reported this week that broadband users see about half the advertised "up to" speeds promised by Internet providers, and similar findings were made earlier this year in the UK. (Keep in mind that some speed problems are outside the control of the ISP, including poor indoor wiring, bad WiFi setups, outdated computer hardware, and Internet congestion.) Given the massive disconnect between the actual and advertised speeds, how is a broadband buyer to know in advance how... | Just hours after iiNet claimed to make history with Australia's first terabyte broadband plans, rival Primus has launched a new 1.1 terabyte offering - upping iiNet's new deal by 111GB per month. Last week, iiNet chief executive Michael Malone said his company didn't see Primus as "particularly relevant, from a competitive point of view", compared with larger rivals such as Telstra, Optus and TPG. But yesterday Primus chief Ravi Bhatia (pictured, above) claimed leadership in the battle to offer Australian... |
|
