Severed fiber cable that stalled Net traffic is repaired

The fiber-optic cable cut in Ohio that disrupted Internet traffic across the United States for nearly 12 hours Wednesday has been repaired.

Normal network traffic was restored just before midnight Wednesday on four OC-192 lines that were accidentally severed by a gas company employee digging with a backhoe about 30 miles east of Cleveland, according to Vaughan Harring, a spokesman for GTE Internetworking in Burlington, Mass.

Technicians from GTE and Qwest, which share ownership and maintenance responsibilities for most of the damaged fiber-optic bundles, made the repair, Harring said.

Could have been worse

The cable cut forced large-scale rerouting of IP traffic resulting in nationwide network congestion and markedly reduced data transmission speeds for a number of ISPs and their customers.

"We were able to reroute around the problem very quickly ... within minutes," Harring said. "After that, it was a matter of degraded performance for some time until the repair was finished."

As bad as it was, Harring said it might have been worse without the redundancies most ISPs have built into their networks.

"This was a significant cut," he said. "If something of this size happened a year ago, it would be more than degraded service.... We'd be talking about a hard outage."