AARRS - Fiber Outage

[BCSO-Insider]

Gotta love CPS fiber. If it was buried like most, maybe it would be more resilient. But not in SA; most is aerial. What could go wrong they (CoSA ITSD) said? It’s a robust network. WRONG! The CoSA, Bexar County, and CPS $80M+ new radio system has already suffered a major outage. Go fiber…NOT! Maybe folks should have paid more attention when all the nerds kept saying that microwave should be deployed at a minimum for backup purposes. The west side of the County is hardest hit. Instead of 5 Nines being 99.999% reliability, in this instance it looks more like 9.9999%.

 

[Ensnared]

LMMFAO.

 

[AI7PM]

Politicians and bureaucrats making decisions on subjects out of their field of knowledge.

 

[KI5IRE]

Good thing they still have Papí EDACS still up and going strong since the 80’s to come in and save the day😂

 

[Cameron314]

Gotta love CPS fiber. If it was buried like most, maybe it would be more resilient. But not in SA; most is aerial. What could go wrong they (CoSA ITSD) said? It’s a robust network. WRONG! The CoSA, Bexar County, and CPS $80M+ new radio system has already suffered a major outage. Go fiber…NOT! Maybe folks should have paid more attention when all the nerds kept saying that microwave should be deployed at a minimum for backup purposes. The west side of the County is hardest hit. Instead of 5 Nines being 99.999% reliability, in this instance it looks more like 9.9999%.

I see many more hits on buried fiber then our ADSS. That said any can be damaged so if you don't want it go do down have a backup.

 

[mwjones]

Doesn't matter if fiber is above ground or underground, it can be damaged. I work in the realm of wireline communications (aka Telephones) and have seen my share of outages over the years, be it by backhoe, over height truck or vandals (twice in one month they opened a pull box at either end of an overpass near Houston, cut the cable and stole 300 feet of fiber thinking it was copper, each time knocking down Internet and Cable service for a couple thousand customers for several hours as crews spliced in replacement fiber).

Microwave can suffer outages as well, so even that is not a foolproof solution.

The only solution is to build redundancy into the system (multiple paths), but the cost of building that redundancy can get prohibitive, especially on most Governments budgets.

 

[KevinC]

So no alternate backhaul path? Or am I missing something.

Was it designed this way or was this a cost-cutting “feature” Harris changed?

 

[blantonl]

I heard the announcement on Saturday over BCSO and they said it was jus the Cagnon site that was experiencing problems. Was it worse?

 

[NC5267]

Is one of the simulcast sites at Cagnon? Or was it the edacs Cagnon.

 

[blantonl]

I wasn't sure. BCSO just did an e-tone announcing that Cagnon was down and there would be degraded radio coverage.

On another note, News 4 did a blurb on the news last night about Harlandale's "New P25 System" - they budgeted 5.5M for it. It's on GATTRS and is pretty active. Pretty fancy

 

[NC5267]

I guess Harlandale PD decided to go that route and just have access to the AARRS for interop