JRRZZ Blog

Ever since we’ve received fiber to the home in my town I’ve been happily browsing the web using this awesome new 100Mbit/s service. Okay, some of the ISP services have been failing, but the link itself is fine. I’m even watching Discovery HD without any problems. Hell, even the phones work.

I work only a few kilometers from where I live (because I’m a lazy bastard), so obviously we’ve got fiber to the office as well. If only that worked as well as the connection I’ve got at home.

The trouble started when we decided to ask for a business link in stead of a regular link. We’d get 100Mbit/s guaranteed and a 1Gb/s cross link with our other building down the street. There was also some deal with an SIP trunk for a telephony, to enable our regiment of well spoken ladies to chat along freely with the customers. It all sounded pretty nice, and looked like it too. On paper that is.

To sweeten the deal, we’ve rented out a part of our building to the fiber business. We got our fiber for cheap, and they got a nice place for customer service. Whenever we had a problem, we could just walk over to the fiber people and talk nerdy to each other. Maybe even share some IT war stories, who knows.

Four months behind schedule, random people started digging randomly with even more random equipment around our premises. The pavement had to be yanked out, a trench had to be dug and lots of coffee had to be consumed. You couldn’t talk with the digging crew, they all spoke some eastern European language. After the digging crew left, another group of professionals dove into the trenches to fill them with shiny new fiber cables. After they left, the original crew could come back to fill up the trenches with the original soil and put the pavement back where it belonged. This setup sounds great in theory, but these people managed to screw a few things up. The coordination between the two crews wasn’t that well thought out. Trenches would stay open for days, waiting for fiber that just wouldn’t come. The town center looked like a WWI war zone during a weekend. Everybody knows that when you make a hole, put something in it, and put the original soil back, you’ll end up with too much soil. Apparently they didn’t know that. So after these people were finished, you could just follow the narrow stretched speed bumps in the pavement to see where the fiber went into the ground. Anyway, while they were messing around with the orange bundles of joy, we started to wonder why our office didn’t get entrenched. Every other building in the street got their trench, but not us. Did we collaborate with the enemy or something? Why didn’t we get one of those defensive perimeters?

After a while, the eastern European diggers were gone, the opposing factions reached a peace agreement and the trenches vanished from our streets. Minus the pedestrian speed bumps of course, those were still everywhere, causing elderly people to break bones they didn’t even know they had. Everybody in our neighborhood had their orange bundle of fiber sticking out of the pavement, but we didn’t. Neither did our fiber supplying neighbors, who were running the whole show. Somehow they managed to skip themselves and us in their planning.

As (a lot of) time passed by, one by one the naked fiber strings, which were sticking out of the pavement while enduring the worst Dutch weather could throw at them, were warmly tucked away in people’s houses and offices. Even our fiber friends next door managed to get their own fiber connection, illegally adding cabling to our building, while they should’ve connected us instead. We managed the building’s internal gigabit network, on which they could surf the intertubes. So now we had no fiber, no connection and a tenant who does, but doesn’t want to share.

After lots of whining and complaining, the eastern European dudes came back and fixed us some fiber. The complimentary pedestrian speed bump was placed nicely in front of our doorstep. It took even longer for the technicians to hook it all up, but finally we had two fiber connections. What, two? Apparently we needed one for regular internet, and the other one for the link to our other building. The original plan was to put the internet connection at the other building and route the internet connection through the gigabit fiber cross link. We finally had fiber to the office, almost a year behind schedule and twice as many cables as we originally thought we’d get.

But we weren’t there yet. Oh no. People had to activate our connection first. In order to do that they needed to know what kind of connection we had in mind. Somehow something went wrong between sales and the technical people, because now we needed to buy some really expensive Cisco equipment all of a sudden. According to the engineers, that’s the only way to create a sustainable VLAN across their fiber network. We’re a 3com shop, so that would’ve caused quite some havoc in our network unless we added some routers as well. During the process the government telecom watchdog intervened and split the fiber company in two, causing the price to go up. This made the whole ordeal even more expensive than a Cogent multi-gigabit carrier line. Even registering ourselves as an ISP on the (now separated) network, with all the hardware it takes, would’ve been cheaper. So after some debate, we chose to get two regular connections, one of which with 100Mbit/s guaranteed. We only needed one, but it would be a shame not to use the extra fiber. After all that was communicated and done, we got the connections activated. One of these connections was the business line, but they didn’t tell which one. Both the fiber modems were identical and weren’t marked. We couldn’t tell the difference either, because the fiber provider activated both of them as regular consumer lines. Later they told us their activation scheme works using addresses only, so it couldn’t even handle two lines at the same address. So we’ve connected one of the modems to our company router and told the ISP to use that particular modem as a business line. Up until this day we haven’t received a business connection.

After the fiber people cleaned up, the town center continued it’s daily life. People were happily watching HD adult entertainment, calling distant friends and sending spam in unprecedented volumes in their newly fiber connected homes. This digital utopia would only last this long, because a large group of people who can’t even spell the word education decided to start WWII.

Their mission was to turn the peaceful town center into a battlefield again. They brought bigger toys with them as well. While the fiber people could easily manage with a set of spades, these uneducated grunts brought heavy machinery. Slowly it became apparent they were just there to replace the sewage and water systems, the pavement and some shrubberies. After two days of digging they had uncovered almost all of the fiber again, some of it dangerously dangling over deep holes they created to replace the sewage piping.

A few days later we suffered a major brown out. Only our radio kept playing, because it’s built out of an old laptop. One of the half-brained apes in orange clothing managed to cut the power lines with one of his big digging toys. In doing so he blew a bunch of fuses in a central power hub, cutting off half the town. It’s not that bad for an IT company to suffer a brown out, compared to the fact that we had a Perfect Draft next to the fridge, keeping our beer from going bad. We had to drink all of our beer that day. Luckily the power people have been able to fix it quite fast.

Only a short while later the infantile orange dressed mammals did it again, but this time they pulled our precious fiber to bits. Right in front of our door. Luckily the fiber technicians have been able to weld the two pieces back together again. We’ve only suffered minor downtime in comparison to what happened next.

Now these shit-for-brains dirt cowboys have really done it. They’ve completely destroyed an important fiber linkage, causing almost two hundred homes and businesses to lose connection, including us. According to the fiber gurus they can’t fix it this time, without having to replace the whole cable. That means they have to open up the pavement again, all the way back to the junction box, on the other side of the village. This’ll probably take all weekend, so that’s even more downtime.

There are two things that’ll probably happen now after all of this fiber failing. Some lawyers are going to get paid, and paid well. Some nine months after these brown and web outs, we’ll have to welcome lots and lots of new inhabitants in our village.