Do You Live In A Single Strand Community???

In the BOB Cash thread someone spoke of banks adding redundancies for their ATM's etc.

It brought back a problem we encountered here in my small suburb of the DFW metroplex.

When I was with SBC (now A.T.&.T.), I worked in my own home town wire center (exchange). Each wire center has its own Central Office (C.O.) Each C.O. must then connect via some means of backhaul (Fiber, Microwave, etc.) to other C.O.'s. Almost all C.O.'s have redundant backhaul lines to get voice/data out of the local area, but some don't.
The town I live/work in is a single strand (single backhaul) wire center. We all knew where it ran along side the road, and watched the area closely for unauthorized excavations that would endanger it. Then an old water main burst and the city was digging before we could stop them. When they cut the single strand, they effectively cut-off all communications to the outside world from our C.O. We could send/receive land line calls inside the exchange C.O., but cell and calls outside the C.O. were NO GO.

It might not hurt to ask your telco if you live in a single strand exchange. That way if it does get cut, you can know where to move with your cell phone to reach towers served by another exchange C.O.

Must be a really small town, the only place I can think of was the small town where I went to school, it had main street, upper street and lower street.
At least you could drive to another town and use the ATM. I've had situations where I couldn't, in fact just last week I requested a new card because the signature block on mine wore off enough that vendors were asking to see ID. The bank canceled my card and issued me a new number, I assumed it would just be a replacement card with the same number so when I went to use it and it was declined it took a bit to figure out what must have happened. I had to use the card from my other bank twice then. I have my check deposited into two accounts at two banks just for some redundancy.

It is a town of about 60,000 directly bordering Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington Texas. The C.O. actually serves about 150,000 though. Most true rural small towns have a single fiber that passes thru. That means calls can go either way. One would have to cut the line on each side of town to prevent any calls to/from that C.O.

So they had no real alternate back up, not even old tech?
I know it might be slower but is there no way to transmit data over regular phone lines, microwave or radio links or anything?
Pony Express maybe?

I don't know, but to be totally reliant on only one form of technology seems kind of limiting.

Banks stopped using dial up lines for ATM's since the days of war dialing.

Would not have mattered. ZERO calls of any nature could leave the local area. The local C.O. was cut off from the outside world, even though the world was only across the street in many instances. All the data/voice that travels on any telco line travels thru a telco C.O. Even cell calls go to a land fiber from the tower to the telephone system.

Even microwave/radio backhaul must get to the landline/fiber network some time. We would often microwave backhaul from one or more cell sites with no fiber to a node site that did have fiber access. From there it was off to the C.O. on fiber.

Keep in mind, your cell call goes from your phone to the tower. From the tower to the landlines. From the landlines to the tower closest to the cell phone you are calling, or to the landline you are calling.

It is somewhat like FEDEX. If you FEDEX a package from Dallas, TX to Fort Worth, TX, it will travel thru the FEDEX hub (C.O.) in Memphis, TN. Quite a trip for that letter to actually only move 45 miles from one desk to another.

I was reading this news article and I knew that it sounded familiar to an old post. Desperado mentioned this scenario before, so I figured that I would tack on to his original thread.

One severed fiber optic line just south of the San Francisco Bay Area cuts off all phone service--landline and cell--to parts of three counties. Granted, it's not a densely populated region, but the total number affected is also not that small. The phone companies are telling people that if they need medical attention, be prepared to drive yourself to the hospital because you may not be able to dial 911 at all. Yikes, that sounds rather frightening when it's the phone companies telling you this.

Here's the article.

Turns out that the cuts were deliberate, either well equipped vandals or deliberate sabotage. Depending on the news article, it's either four or eight fiber bundles severed at two different locations. Not accidents with a back hoe but someone opened the manholes and went down into the underground utility vaults.

Besides no landline, no cell, no 911, no Internet, no ATM or real-time credit card authorizations, there were a couple other glitches that I hadn't expected to read about.

One was that the police suggested that the banks close. Without phones or access to 911, they were worried that some people might be tempted to rob a bank during this outage.

One gas station said that they couldn't pump gas because they couldn't process credit cards at all. So, being able to take manual imprints didn't seem to be an option in this case. Perhaps some chains require centralized payment processing to turn on the gas pumps? I don't know, but the fact that this gas station couldn't take any CC was surprising to read.

The other thing that I wasn't expecting was the inability of some doctors to access electronic health records for their patients. I'm assuming that this hospital uses some centralized database somewhere offsite. So even though this might the usual place where a patient comes in, their records just aren't stored there.

The 911 folks in one area had their calls diverted outside the region to another call center. I assume that there's already some mutual aid protocol set up for this. But that outside call center takes the call, then somehow units back in the affected area get dispatched. Fortunately, sounded like a quiet day for emergency services.

You know, one has to wonder if this was a proof of theory scenario for something larger. I mean, what literally took probably 10 minutes of actual, physical work, crippled a town. Literally. These guys knew what they were doing; one HAS to think of what the motive behind it is...

OK Arney, you got my interest when you started listing the knock on effects.
I am looking for the story now to read.
Following your link now, thanks.

Edit:
Yes, it is quite the story.
The loss of telephony services is more serious than I was thinking at first. Now I will be thinking about how to back up services that depend on it

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to disrupt one of these systems either. Just let the single strand run into a conduit that travels attached to an overpass on the highway. Now let an over tall truck hit the underside of said overpass. Took 4 men about 30 hours to unscrew that mess. I remeber, I was one of the four.

And a $250,000 reward by AT&T to boot. I see $100,000 still mentioned in some articles but it went up further to $250K.