Elderly lady cuts off Internet in Armenia

Not just Armenia: <i>In addition, areas of Georgia and Azerbaijan were also taken offline.</i><p>Much more detail in The Guardian article:<p><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-cuts-web-access" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-c...</a>

‎"Our fibre backbone conforms to the highest level's of physical security", Mr. Ionatamishvili later said - calming worries that any curious eavesdropper could Man-in-the-Middle his countries communications. "We hide at least 70% of it under train tracks or shrubbery."

I like the euphemism 'while foraging for copper wire'. Maybe we should use that phrase for torrents 'piracy?!? - no, don't be silly - I was just foraging for movies'.

They'll probably reinstall that cable, now, with one small addition: an off switch, and a soldier on post nearby. "Hello, Sergey, headquarters here. there's another insurrection. Throw the off switch." <i>Sergey throws off switch</i> "Okay, done." <i>no signal</i> "Hello? Hello?"

Poor lady faces prison. What about people responsible for laying a cable like that, accessible to anyone with small scissors?

What puzzles me is that Georgian Telecom didn't put in place any secondary line/s to provide an alternative path in case of issues on the working path.<p>Update: Checking Railway Telecom site <a href="http://grt.ge/?m=static&#38;s=5" rel="nofollow">http://grt.ge/?m=static&#38;s=5</a> (here for the interactive map: <a href="http://grt.ge/?m=static&#38;s=6" rel="nofollow">http://grt.ge/?m=static&#38;s=6</a>) looks like it's an optical network based on CWDM equipments with links that provide a bit more than two 10GE between the nodes, definitely not a top-notch network. Automated path protection facilities couldn't even be available for networks of this type.<p>Update 2: Just noticed that the two bigger 10GE paths create a channel only from Poti to Tbilisi, so bandwidth for communications between internal nodes is provided by the other links (slower optical links and the ethernet ones (copper? hm) shown on the map).

I was affected by this outage. During that time I realized that Internet has became vital part of out life, like electricity or water.