In a technology version of the classic “My dog ate my homework” excuse, we were recently called onsite to a local school, where the network had suddenly gone offline. It turned out to be a case of “A rat ate my network”…
Day 1:
We arrived onsite to discover that their entire network was down, including all Internet access. We looked at their data room and discovered that five out of 6 strands of fiber that provide their backbone connection were severely damaged for unknown reasons and were passing no light. An entire section of each was actually completely missing!
We managed to do an in-place splice to bring them back on-line by having one tech hold the fusion splicer up near the ceiling while the other tech hastily cleaved and spliced the strands from a ladder. Light was verified and the network came back up. Not the prettiest work, but it was working again quickly and we offered to provide them with a quote to properly replace the damaged bundle.
Day 2:
We received a call that they were down once again and we high-tailed it back over to the school. Once onsite, we discovered that the fiber was again completely severed and missing up to the bulkheads in the panel. All evidence of our previous work was COMPLETELY gone. This time, however, we found copious rat droppings in the panel along with bits of the damaged fiber that remained.
So, we installed a secure wall-mount fiber enclosure and routed fiber into that, where we terminated a new bulkhead and locked it up – hopefully safe from rodent tampering!
It’s interesting to note that this particular rat seemed to have a taste for the 10gig aqua 50 micron multi-mode fiber and it left the standard orange 62.5 micron multi-mode alone. I wonder what wine goes with aqua fiber?
Did you know that we operate a full service low-voltage structured cabling group and field service division, including fiber optic splicing, security systems and more?