I wish that article focused solely on whether or not the technology actually works, rather than leaning heavily on the “problematic” aspect that forces people to maybe face facts that run counter to their dishonest or at least misleading narratives.
That article is mentioned in the ACLU piece, as Shot Spotter is trying a $300 million defamation suit over it. They claim they always do a secondary "detailed forensic report" and their communication with police about that is inconsequential.
It's easy in a lab, in a city with potential for fairly arbitrary reverberations hitting the microphone at fairly arbitrary timings it's right up there with forensic fire analysis and other crap like that.
I’d guess a backfire (or afterfire) is significantly subsonic and therefore probably has a different (less sharp) profile than gunshot report of typical ammunition.
It's definitely not the second-most common pistol round, especially in crime. It's way below .22LR and 9mm. Might even be below .380 ACP, .38 Special, and .25 ACP too. The guns used in crime are quite different than the guns preferred by the enthusiast community -- they're generally older, smaller, and cheaper.
.380 ACP, .38 special, and .25 ACP are also subsonic in their most commonly available rounds. As is .22LR as long as it is being shot out of a pistol (longer barrels will accelerate it past supersonic velocities, but almost all ammo is subsonic out of a pistol like a mark IV).
According to this survey on guns used in crime, it is 9mm, followed by .40 S&W (a typically transonic round), and then .45ACP.
I went to college in Flint. Hearing gunshots were not uncommon. You can tell the difference from a car backfire. At it's core the "chamber" size is different. This creates a different reverb pattern, sound pattern, and frequency.
I'm guessing you could imagine the difference between slapping a surface of water vs concrete. The over noise will be dominated by the sound of your hand, but you can hear specifics for each.
----
Whether or not these systems can tell the difference, I'm not sure.
i hear gunshots every.single.night ( live in Oak Cliff which is on the South side of downtown Dallas ). It's so annoying and then maybe 10% of the time you get the helicopter about 5min later. You can tell gunshots from car backfires because there's 4 or 5 of them in row. pop-pop-pop-pop-pop vs one low-rolling bang
Edit: usually what this is is people leaving a bar/club and sticking their pistol out of their window on the way out of the parking lot. On a nice day with the windows open you'll hear the same when the Cowboys score a touchdown. basically impossible to catch/stop
From my understanding, looking into making an open source version years ago, a human will actually listen to the audio clip and verify, plus there is some triangulation going on where they can determine the speed of the bullet and direction for at least high powered bullets using multiple microphones.
How often do cars backfire? The internet is telling me that fuel injection and computer controlled mixtures have made it rare in modern vehicles. Carburetors were largely gone from new cars by around 1990.
Construction sounds might be a more common issue. Lots of nail guns use cartridge loads, for example. Or fireworks. Or impact hammers like you would use in a muffler shop, street jackhammers, etc.
It's relatively uncommon nowadays compared to the number of cars that don't backfire. But I certainly hear cars backfiring more frequently than I hear gunshots.
A UK research company developed this kind of microphone array tech in the 90s. It first came to fame in the Bosnian war and was used by UK peacekeeper troops to enforce ceasefires. In that case it was most useful for detecting artillery fire and could instantly say what kind of weapon was fired, where it was, and when it fired. This could be used to instantly work out who broke the ceasefire, and peacekeepers could even fire back to destroy the rogue artillery piece and restore order.
Most people are not shooting straight up vertically. In practice, they are typically shooting at a high angle such that it creates a long arc and this would not be first time something (or someone) got shot at a distance that no one intended to shoot.
In most cases, "celebratory gunfire" is harmless. In some cases though, people end up injured or dead - there's a decent sized list on Wikipedia [1]. The key issue is, you only have "terminal velocity" at play when shooting up straight at 90 degrees in the air. The more "sideways" you get from that, the more energy will be kept during the fall.
And drag applies to any direction of travel, if terminal velocity for a small, dense object like a bullet was reached as quickly as willis936 thinks firearms would have much shorter maximum ranges.
I had a projectile take out one of the PV panels on my roof. Judging by the hole it was a bullet, though I didn't find anything - if it was a meteorite I would be more excited (and more disappointed not to have found it).
That was through the wall not the ceiling. Bullets fired into air and returning to earth (assuming straight up so little to no horizontal velocity) don’t have the kinetic energy to go through a roof and kill someone.
I wouldn't assume it was accidental. There were rifle attacks on power stations in California back in 2014 that came very close to causing widespread blackouts in one of our most densely populated areas. It took them 27 days to get the station back up and running. Imagine LA without power for a month... They considered that a dress rehearsal and a message. Maybe this is similar?
Well the article says they were in a car shooting into the air.
I would assume some street criminal was having fun or doing a drive by warning by shooting into the air from inside their car but who knows.
The Raiders moved mostly due to receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in public financing to build a state of the art stadium in Las Vegas as opposed to playing in the semi-decrepit Oakland coliseum.
I have experience with this, this happened at our office in Houston. In that area, Comcast hung its fiber on the power poles, and I strongly suspect someone got drunk and decided to pop random hanging cables.
i bet if they just hung a $20 piece of iron with a target painted on it the problems would cease. People will shoot at the target and spare the expensive fiber (unless they're specifically targeting the fiber which i bet is rare)
You're seriously overestimating how accurate handguns are. Granted, I suck, but at 20 yards, I couldn't get 18 carefully aimed shoots on the same large piece of paper. None of them were anywhere near the center. At 10 yards, I managed to get everything within the outer ring.
Giving people a target to shoot at would cause more problems than it would solve.
Yeah I think this is getting closer to the truth. The bang for the buck isn’t there and the corruption in the department is rampant, even with oversight.
> In 25 cities, such as Denver and Oakland, officials moved to remove police from schools, saving an additional $34m.
I take the "saving" money as a form of "defunding" the police (as the defunding isnt actually the point, but the redirection of resources toward better applications and away from racially unequal applications)
Because folks in rural areas never get drunk and shoot random shit that isn't theirs? When I worked at Boeing, we had a recurring problem, that airplane fuselages were shipped by rail, and they were frequently pierced by multiple bullet holes. This is one of those instances where the urban/rural crime gap is partly explained by the reliability of crime reporting.
Why would would you conclude that? There's a whole lot of rail between Wichita (Kansas), where the 37 fuselages were made, and Renton, where they were delivered.
Stop signs are another common target of vandals in rural areas; in some places, they've all been blasted with a shotgun at least once. I've spent a lot of time in rural parts, and have witnessed quite a few incidents of bored, drunk kids shooting shit up.
And, more to the point, I've seen shot-up fuselages on a train in Ellensburg, heading West. Those gunshots didn't happen in the Seattle area.
that must be a west coast thing then, because here in the Mid-West where corn out numbers people I do not see any sign's shot up... Teen Pranks of Spray painting a 1 in front of the 60 on a speed limit is about is far is I have seen
When we go plinking here we are shooting cans, jugs, and other trash. Not road signs, and power cables
Since you are using the term redneck I doubt you are from the midwest ( Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. ) or if you are you are from a Urban city center not a farm...
Redneck is more of a southern state term, many southern states (like TN and KY) are confused as Mid-west, they are not
Fiber optic cables in Oregon are owned by the state and run above ground, hunters around the area would occasionally shoot out the major lines "accidentally while hunting"
There's something Special about Oregon and fiber optic placement (at least, that's what I was told at the time; the article says instead this was Google owned fiber that was undergrounded eventually).
AT&T Fiber is in Austin. In my neighborhood, that's delivered via the overhead lines. My internet connection is literally a fiber that drops form a cable in my backyard from a bigger fiber, through my wall, into a fiber terminator. If you shot at that cable, about 500 people might lose access. In other locations, I assume they undergrounded conduits a long time ago and run the fiber through that to a local box, which then either runs underground to houses, or ... over poles that drop to houses.
Long ago a customer who had a data center hastily constructed would call me every Monday morning about 4am to find out if his DS3's were up. I'd check and let him know.
After one day where all of them were down at the same time he said "Damn homeless people!" He later explained the local telco hastily ran lines under a bridge to get some circuits setup on time. The local homeless folks tended to gather under the bridge and when they started fires to keep warm his circuits running above them would heat up and go down.
I somewhat doubt that homeless people are stealing fiber. The base of that bridge is pretty accessible, but it looks like the cables were stolen multiple stories in the air.
It's not fiber, it's copper. Copper wire theft is very common -- they often go after ground wires. Looks like some fiber was cut in the process of the copper theft since they likely couldn't tell the difference.
About 20 years ago I worked for a CLEC, and the physical plant manager had some stories. Mostly about squirrels, but he had a nice selection of pictures of equipment that had been shot at, as well.
The squirrels I can understand. But why allegedly intelligent humans feel the need to shoot holes in things that don't belong to them, especially obvious things like infrastructure, I just don't get. I love to go plinking, but I put in a lot of effort to be responsible about it. I end up picking up a lot of trash and other people's discarded brass, too.
We have a rescue cat from rural Ohio who came to us with four pellets in her body. The vet said she sees this a lot. So it’s not just infrastructure. Some people are just stupid, irresponsible, cruel, or all three, and some of those people have guns.
Or, a feral cat who has been shitting in your planter boxes and eating your birds is fair game. Easy to treat it like a raccoon that decides to live under your porch, there’s no difference.
Or a human who thinks planter boxes are worth more than a living thing. Easy to treat it like subhuman that lives under a bridge, there's no difference.
Or a human who is tired of his small children picking up literal cat feces from the feral cat who is pooping in their planters. I would recommend looking up Toxoplasma Gondii.
Any land owner who's attended a hunter's safety course and has purchased a small game license and during the appropriate season. There are exceptions for some pests and farmers as well, but, no, in Wisconsin you can't just shoot animals.
Shooting an animal with ammunition too small to kill it quickly is cruelty. Wounding an animal and failing to track it down and finish it off is cruelty. Shooting when you're not confident you will make the kill is cruelty. These are pretty basic things.
You will find that people who grew up on farms or just in the country have a very different definition of "cruelty to animals". Shooting a pest animal is just a Tuesday. Not worth mentioning or remembering. Doing it with the pellet gun instead of the .22 or shotgun is because you were feeling magnanimous that day, or you sold out and moved to the 'burbs but still don't want pests wrecking your stuff, and don't want to risk discharging a real firearm. A cat that you don't have around on purpose very well may qualify as a pest animal. Know how people complain about outdoor cats killing enormous numbers of birds? You got a bird feeder or birdhouse, and a cat is hanging around it, that's a pest animal. Got chickens, or other fowl, same ("how will a cat kill a chicken?" Well, 1. you'd be surprised, and 2. most people keep chicks inside but juvenile chickens exist and tend to live outdoors). Just prefer not to have wild predators spreading disease to your own pets or livestock, same. That it only got a pellet means this is its lucky day. Blame the people who keep breeding more damn cats than the world needs, or assholes who abandon their pets if they decide they don't want them. Listen to Bob Barker, folks.
... that out of the way, there are way too many people who do shoot stuff, and even animals, that they have no reason to and probably shouldn't, for fun. Some may be psychopaths, but I'd bet most are just actual card-carrying morons with poor impulse control. All are best avoided.
I just dug a grave for neighbors dog with my backhoe. He then shot the dog, who was going senile and started to get violent.
I personally would have called out the vet but he’s done it this way, his parents did it this way, his wife’s family has always done it this way.
There are many different ways to live, I am glad people are able to find ones compatible with their worldview, and miraculously we mostly manage to get along.
To be clear, this particular cat was not feral. But if you’re going to kill an animal, then take responsibility and kill it, don’t just use it for target practice.
While I did electrocute a problem rat one time when I couldn’t think of any way to deter it, it seems very cavalier to shoot a cat or raccoon for the crime of living under a porch. It’s just trying to survive and do it’s thing.
Neighbor had 16k in damage from the raccoon living under porch. Found a screen into crawl space, destroyed water pipes, flooded crawl space and caused extensive water damage to flooring. Gut and remodel bathroom and adjoining wall.
A big part of the population are complete morons. They have access to guns. Mental visualisation of the resulting Venn diagram should explain the result.
A former acquaintance of mine is an example of the moron. He had an outbuilding on his property and a shotgun license. Clearly the best way to deal with the squirrels using the suspended mains cable between the buildings was to shoot them. Much hilarity ensued as he managed to ruin his entire frozen food supply in the outbuilding by not thinking of the causal relationship between shooting at shit and the consequences.
> A big part of the population are complete morons
I've seen smart people be super destructive. Shooting at power transformers and what not. They knew what was going to happen. It is more like personal issues and boredom rather than stupidity
Ironically, In the US it is only common in places with very restrictive gun laws. Also Chances are the person(s) firing into the air are not in legal possession of the gun they are firing
It depends on the local culture. In Wisconsin, I haven't seen many holes in roadsigns. A lot of rural people have guns for hunting or wildlife control and for the most part are relatively responsible with them.
I suspect in places where guns are tools, less of this stuff happens.
Networks that allowed multiple comparable paths between critical nodes 24 months ago may no longer be as redundant with so much WFH and all the other developments of the pandemic.
If that were the case, then you would expect to see degraded service, not total loss of service. And anyway what should be getting overloaded by lots of subscriber use is switching equipment, not cables. Cables have ridiculous amounts of bandwidth, and fibers are so cheap compared to the fixed installation cost that you're out of your mind if you install a cable without running 10X the glass you actually expect to light up.
Because redundancy is a basic expectation for an infrastructure service, not an add-on extra.
There are a million other things that can also take out a cable. Maybe it's OK for that to knock out 1000 subscribers, if it can be fixed quickly, No way is it OK for it to knock out 30000 subscribers.
Redundancy in the last mile? None of the infrastructure services provides that for residential customers. Not for internet, not for power, not for gas, not for water.
A cable that's carrying traffic for 30,000 subscribers is "backbone" enough. I don't expect redundant paths to my block, but 30,000 is a big enough area that it's reasonable to expect it not to be knocked out by single, reasonably likely events. Even for power, which is much, much more expensive to make redundant, single transmission lines that can knock out that many people should be rare.
Oakland is fairly densely populated urban area. 30k subscribers is roughly an area of 3 sq miles. It's normal for any type of infrastructure service not have redundancy for it.
I hate Comcast as much as most other people, but this is not something I can blame them for. It's a reasonably sized area for last mile service.
Thinking you can just buy 2 of everything is poor engineering practice. That's almost never practical. Engineering is about balancing reliability with other factors, not just over designing things.
Then again, maybe you're right, and you're the first person to come up with this idea.
So, I got interested, and I took some time and asked around and did some research.
According to somebody on /r/Grid_Ops, normal practice is for every single electrical substation to have redundant incoming feeds.
PG&E's "Local Capacity Area Substation List" lists 33 substations in Oakland. Wikipedia says that the population of Oakland is 440,000. So that's about 13,500 subscribers per substation (rounding up). I imagine the size varies, and some of those substations are probably dedicated to big industrial users. So let's say the bigger ones are more than double the average size and serve 30,000 subscribers.
That means that the utility is, in fact, providing redundant transmission lines at the scale of 30,000 subscribers. In fact, on the average they're probably providing redundancy at a much smaller scale than that. That's in spite of the fact that electrical power line redundancy is many times more expensive than data line redundancy. Running a 115kV feed for a substation is a whole different kind of project from running a fiber bundle.
But we're not done. That 30,000 is what you'd lose if the whole substation went out, but a substation is much better protected than a cable. To get to something comparable to this fiber case, we need to ask how many people losing any single cable might take out. That's much less than 30,000 or even 13,500, because a substation has a lot more than one downstream line, and those downstream lines are independent of one another. Losing any one of them doesn't knock out every subscriber of the substation.
I'm still unsure about that number, but from what I've seen it looks like it'd be more like 5000 at the absolute maximum, if a line got hit right next to the substation. If it got hit after some branching had happened, it would be much less than that.
It's less clear, but another person on /r/Grid_Ops suggested that they'd think of anything over 15MW as a "major outage", in a context that seemed to imply that "major outages" were the sort of thing you'd expect to have redundancy to prevent. I'm again not completely sure, but I get the impression that that's around 3000 residential subscribers.
So, no, it is not "normal" for "any type of infrastructure" service not to have redundancy for three densely populated square miles.
Stuff like this has been a problem in the US mountain west so long that all the big substations that are remotely near roads have been getting berms and plating around key equipment because you'll drive down any given road in rural New Mexico or where-ever and every single road sign is pockmarked with bullet impacts and in some cases giant tears from the larger calibers.
It's a silent impetus behind so much of the communications out there staying on microwave or powerline carrier despite fiber runs being cheap and easy.
So, a shooting was reported and videotaped two hours before the outage?
It would seem that either the bullets fired in the air decided to hover for a while before dropped back down, or the first shooting had nothing to do with the outage, or..? Odd writeup.
Also,
> Along with Internet connectivity, all Comcast Xfinity services, including [...] home security systems went down.
I wonder how many consumers realize that their home security system is tied to the "cable"? Or the same with their Comcast "landline"?
There's literally a photo of a wire with a bullet hole.
Of course the shooting 2 hours prior wasn't the exact time this bullet was launched. It's just putting into context that there was shooting going around the neighborhood that morning.
Why didn't the shot spotters pick up the cable shooting if it was separate from the one OPD was investigating? Why wasn't there an outage earlier? Odd.
We should invent a system to transmit packets that is resilient to nukes. Maybe Department of Defense should get involved. Maybe they should even make some advanced research project agency or something.
Oakland is fairly densely populated urban area. 30k subscribers is an other way of saying, that people living in an area of roughly 3 sq miles depend on a single cable. Redundancy for last mile isn't economically feasible for any infrastructure.
I co-op'd at a major cable ISP. Was told that in certain areas they issued company owned firearms to their field employees due to past incidents. Outages caused by gunshots were actually fairly common in certain parts of America.
I live in Oakland and my XFinity internet was broken by this, and the cable TV service was not affected. I have an alternate connection through AT&T fiber, so on our mobile devices we just switched to the other WiFi and carried on.
Unfortunately our TiVo Edge uses an Ethernet connection to the XFinity cable modem, and TiVo's OS responds to an internet outage by deciding your TiVo account is closed and it silently stops recording anything, even after the network comes back. It takes a reboot to fix this.
It deliberately skipped recording some things on Sunday night I'd been looking forward to. If I hadn't noticed this morning and forced a reboot it would still be stuck in that state. I am really annoyed that they coded their software like that. It's like withdrawing service the second it can't be verified is TiVo's top priority and they don't even bother trying to restore service afterwards.
145 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadhttps://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-sh...
According to this survey on guns used in crime, it is 9mm, followed by .40 S&W (a typically transonic round), and then .45ACP.
https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/publications/f...
I'm guessing you could imagine the difference between slapping a surface of water vs concrete. The over noise will be dominated by the sound of your hand, but you can hear specifics for each.
----
Whether or not these systems can tell the difference, I'm not sure.
Edit: usually what this is is people leaving a bar/club and sticking their pistol out of their window on the way out of the parking lot. On a nice day with the windows open you'll hear the same when the Cowboys score a touchdown. basically impossible to catch/stop
You shoot into the air and what goes up must come down. And still has velocity.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/21/british-man-...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/more-california-...
It was fiber optic cable so you can't blame copper theft as the motive, sabotage was clearly intended.
In this case, Oakland being Oakland, it could just as well have been hoodlums trying to show off their marksmanship.
It very well could be. But, people who steal things often do so hastily.
Giving people a target to shoot at would cause more problems than it would solve.
I take the "saving" money as a form of "defunding" the police (as the defunding isnt actually the point, but the redirection of resources toward better applications and away from racially unequal applications)
We're generally agreeing here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've had to warn you about this already. I don't want to ban you, so would you please fix this?
And you believe this was from Rural Area's? Why?
I see alot of train damage, vandalism, graffiti, and gun shots occurring in urban area's
And, more to the point, I've seen shot-up fuselages on a train in Ellensburg, heading West. Those gunshots didn't happen in the Seattle area.
When we go plinking here we are shooting cans, jugs, and other trash. Not road signs, and power cables
Redneck is more of a southern state term, many southern states (like TN and KY) are confused as Mid-west, they are not
Maybe it's a West Coast thing.
In most of the south, besides maybe Austin or Atl, we ain't got no fiber to be shootin'.
AT&T Fiber is in Austin. In my neighborhood, that's delivered via the overhead lines. My internet connection is literally a fiber that drops form a cable in my backyard from a bigger fiber, through my wall, into a fiber terminator. If you shot at that cable, about 500 people might lose access. In other locations, I assume they undergrounded conduits a long time ago and run the fiber through that to a local box, which then either runs underground to houses, or ... over poles that drop to houses.
it really is a series of tubes
After one day where all of them were down at the same time he said "Damn homeless people!" He later explained the local telco hastily ran lines under a bridge to get some circuits setup on time. The local homeless folks tended to gather under the bridge and when they started fires to keep warm his circuits running above them would heat up and go down.
It's hitting affected businesses hard; they can't process credit cards or receive call-in orders.
The squirrels I can understand. But why allegedly intelligent humans feel the need to shoot holes in things that don't belong to them, especially obvious things like infrastructure, I just don't get. I love to go plinking, but I put in a lot of effort to be responsible about it. I end up picking up a lot of trash and other people's discarded brass, too.
You can also enjoy this classic comic to help re-align you on how many birds cats kill: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/domestic-viole...
Wisconsin generally allows any land owner to shoot/trap coyote, beaver, fox, raccoon, woodchuck, rabbit, and squirrel.
... that out of the way, there are way too many people who do shoot stuff, and even animals, that they have no reason to and probably shouldn't, for fun. Some may be psychopaths, but I'd bet most are just actual card-carrying morons with poor impulse control. All are best avoided.
I personally would have called out the vet but he’s done it this way, his parents did it this way, his wife’s family has always done it this way.
There are many different ways to live, I am glad people are able to find ones compatible with their worldview, and miraculously we mostly manage to get along.
A former acquaintance of mine is an example of the moron. He had an outbuilding on his property and a shotgun license. Clearly the best way to deal with the squirrels using the suspended mains cable between the buildings was to shoot them. Much hilarity ensued as he managed to ruin his entire frozen food supply in the outbuilding by not thinking of the causal relationship between shooting at shit and the consequences.
Yea we have gun morons in the UK too.
I've seen smart people be super destructive. Shooting at power transformers and what not. They knew what was going to happen. It is more like personal issues and boredom rather than stupidity
I don't do it, but I gotta say... Target signage calls to me :<
it is not a problem / common where I am in the US
The rural areas with lax gun laws and bullet holes in most street signs disagree with your claim.
None of the roads signs around me, or in of the areas I grew up in or lived in had wide scale bullet holes in them (Mid-west USA)
I noticed the opposite on dirt roads in the midwest. It's rare to find a stop sign with no bullet holes.
I suspect in places where guns are tools, less of this stuff happens.
You must not travel. I've seen shot-up roadside signs in plenty of countries.
Two is one and one is none.
Infrastructure isn't software.
There are a million other things that can also take out a cable. Maybe it's OK for that to knock out 1000 subscribers, if it can be fixed quickly, No way is it OK for it to knock out 30000 subscribers.
Redundancy in the last mile? None of the infrastructure services provides that for residential customers. Not for internet, not for power, not for gas, not for water.
Let's not normalize bad behavior here.
I hate Comcast as much as most other people, but this is not something I can blame them for. It's a reasonably sized area for last mile service.
Then again, maybe you're right, and you're the first person to come up with this idea.
Physical path redundancy for backhaul and/or feeders does not require two of everything, merely that you close the loop.
According to somebody on /r/Grid_Ops, normal practice is for every single electrical substation to have redundant incoming feeds.
PG&E's "Local Capacity Area Substation List" lists 33 substations in Oakland. Wikipedia says that the population of Oakland is 440,000. So that's about 13,500 subscribers per substation (rounding up). I imagine the size varies, and some of those substations are probably dedicated to big industrial users. So let's say the bigger ones are more than double the average size and serve 30,000 subscribers.
That means that the utility is, in fact, providing redundant transmission lines at the scale of 30,000 subscribers. In fact, on the average they're probably providing redundancy at a much smaller scale than that. That's in spite of the fact that electrical power line redundancy is many times more expensive than data line redundancy. Running a 115kV feed for a substation is a whole different kind of project from running a fiber bundle.
But we're not done. That 30,000 is what you'd lose if the whole substation went out, but a substation is much better protected than a cable. To get to something comparable to this fiber case, we need to ask how many people losing any single cable might take out. That's much less than 30,000 or even 13,500, because a substation has a lot more than one downstream line, and those downstream lines are independent of one another. Losing any one of them doesn't knock out every subscriber of the substation.
I'm still unsure about that number, but from what I've seen it looks like it'd be more like 5000 at the absolute maximum, if a line got hit right next to the substation. If it got hit after some branching had happened, it would be much less than that.
It's less clear, but another person on /r/Grid_Ops suggested that they'd think of anything over 15MW as a "major outage", in a context that seemed to imply that "major outages" were the sort of thing you'd expect to have redundancy to prevent. I'm again not completely sure, but I get the impression that that's around 3000 residential subscribers.
So, no, it is not "normal" for "any type of infrastructure" service not to have redundancy for three densely populated square miles.
It's a silent impetus behind so much of the communications out there staying on microwave or powerline carrier despite fiber runs being cheap and easy.
I don't think it's geographically specific. I've seen plenty of this in New Jersey and upstate New York.
It would seem that either the bullets fired in the air decided to hover for a while before dropped back down, or the first shooting had nothing to do with the outage, or..? Odd writeup.
Also,
> Along with Internet connectivity, all Comcast Xfinity services, including [...] home security systems went down.
I wonder how many consumers realize that their home security system is tied to the "cable"? Or the same with their Comcast "landline"?
Of course the shooting 2 hours prior wasn't the exact time this bullet was launched. It's just putting into context that there was shooting going around the neighborhood that morning.
Why didn't the shot spotters pick up the cable shooting if it was separate from the one OPD was investigating? Why wasn't there an outage earlier? Odd.
Re-dun-dan-see. Learn it, live it, love it.
That came from the guy who thought the next big thing is talking paperclips, right?
Unfortunately our TiVo Edge uses an Ethernet connection to the XFinity cable modem, and TiVo's OS responds to an internet outage by deciding your TiVo account is closed and it silently stops recording anything, even after the network comes back. It takes a reboot to fix this.
It deliberately skipped recording some things on Sunday night I'd been looking forward to. If I hadn't noticed this morning and forced a reboot it would still be stuck in that state. I am really annoyed that they coded their software like that. It's like withdrawing service the second it can't be verified is TiVo's top priority and they don't even bother trying to restore service afterwards.