We got a random LOS at 3 AM in the morning. We thought that was a little weird since it doesn’t go off when the ISP performs maintenance or is down in the area, however we still believed that that was the case. Several hours go by and still no internet, I ask people I know in the area that is subscribed to the same ISP and they said they still have internet, so it must be a problem with us. We didn’t have issues with payment which can only mean it’s a technical problem, we requested a technical visit.
However, while I was waiting for the technical visit coming in the next day or two, I followed the optic fiber cable connected to our modem and saw this (this is outside our house btw), that doesn’t seem like it’s supposed to be like that lol. I closed the box (labeled “FTTH” if that helps) since it was gonna rain and said “f that I’m not messing with optic fiber!”
Here are some supplementary information that may or may not help:
The (white) optic fiber connector connected to the modem is labeled “SC-P”, searched it up and I think it’s a subscriber connector. The (black) optic fiber connector going from the ISP to us has no label however, but seems very similar in terms of how the port looks.
I also live in a 3rd world country, in a city that’s known for crime because squatters in our capital were relocated here, in a neighborhood that is layed out in a way where houses are adjacent to each other, our front door connects straight into a street a few feet wide, and that street connects to a normal street. These facts lead me to think that someone stole a component to sell it for money.
p.s. I just wanted to know what happened, and how we can avoid this problem from ever showing up again.
A very long time ago I worked for a US telephone company helping to operate their Internet service. One day we had an outage that took out a bunch of backbone circuits in the northeast (that we thought were diversely routed but weren’t). The problem was in West Orange, New Jersey. Someone had cut out and taken a big chunk of 96 strand fiber optic cable where it came out of the ground and crossed a ravine attached to the bottom of a railway bridge. Apparently they thought it was copper, which has value as scrap, and were probably very disappointed they did all that work for something that had no value.
So I’m going to guess what you are seeing might be the result of someone starting to rip out a length of copper cable but stopping when they realized it wasn’t. Maybe putting a sign saying “This is fiber optic cable” on the cable would help.
A good few years back there was a major outage in my town when thieves ripped open manhole covers and ducting in a quiet part of an industrial estate over the weekend, and set a huge section of telecoms cables on fire.
This was part of some hare brained scheme to steal copper - but instead resulted in several fibre chambers being completely gutted, breaking multiple provider cables in several places - if they’d planned it like this they couldn’t have had a better result with all of the services they’d knocked out.