I watched some of the repairs today, and have a new appreciation for
what these guys have to deal with.
Jim Nichols
Tullahoma, TN USA
On 12/27/2013 11:52 AM, Ken Norton wrote:
>> Squirrels obviously like a high fibre diet !
> Mice in a telecommunications facility are a disaster. They'll eat
> through fiber-optic cables and jumpers like crazy. The old telephone
> wires used to be lead-sheathed. Lots of squirrels and mice died from
> lead poisoning. The older stuff even had arsenic in it. But mostly,
> they will chew on stuff that has metal sheaths or pull wire in it as
> well as paper wrappings. We're slowly migrating to a newer style of
> "riser cable" (fiber) that has no metal or paper in it at all. The
> mice generally leave that alone as there is no reason for them to chew
> on it. I would say that out of the 350 facilities I am involved in, we
> experience a rodent problem maybe 10 times a gear. The "outside plant"
> guys have to deal with it all the time and we probably have an outage
> somewhere around the country three or four times a day. Of course,
> further south, we have the snakes that make our field equipment home.
> Fortunately, they do keep the mice away and don't chew on the wires.
> But they are brutal on power supplies when they short out a -48vdc
> main buss.
>
> Fortunately, vermin within a facility aren't huge problems, but we
> spend a fortune on extermination efforts. It doesn't take long for us
> to find them as mice will start chewing the day they arrive. Unless
> they are chewing on an old cable that hasn't been mined out of the
> facility, the moment they sever something in use, we know pretty much
> immediately.
>
> FTTH (Fiber to the home) has got another set of issues when it comes
> to critters. There are very good reasons why the industry is slow to
> replace copper.
>
>
--
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