The Dog Ate My Router

Any pet owners who are reading this are well aware of the surprising gifts that your favorite pet can deliver without much warning.? For me, it’s the cats that bring strange gifts, parts of small animals, a wasp, and my favorite of all time, cat puke in my bedroom slippers.

As one who briefly spent time in customer service, it was not uncommon to hear the remarkably weird stories about how “users”, as we called them, managed to destroy perfectly functional computer gear by doing mental gymnastics at near Olympic levels.?? In my own broadband experiences, I had a monthly service call with my rural provider to find out why my DSL stopped working.? We got on a first name basis as he’d troubleshoot things like racoons chewing the telephone wire, flooded DSLAMs that were 30 years old, farmers tilling up underground cables...? And of course, my favorite, when a German Shepard decided a router was a chew toy and spread microchip fragments over two bedrooms, a kitchen, and, of course, a kennel.? Now I’ve looked into this, and there are no documented cases of people or dogs dying from eating a router.

This does pose an interesting problem for Internet Service Providers.? When they install equipment, the equipment is supposed to have a predictable life span with a known Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF).? From this, you can define a customer service territory, and from that, the number of service technicians you need, the number of trucks, and the needed spare equipment level.? This goes into your financial depreciation schedules and your budgeting and determines whether you can sustain a network and keep your customers happy.? But when a dog eats the router, or some high school kid rips all of your copper wire out of the ground to buy some whippets, your carefully crafted Profit & Loss statement starts going to hell.

In urban areas, you actually can calculate a projected loss to vandalism, but in a rural area, where your potential vandals have a density of 1 per square mile, then you have to calculate things like racoon density, coyote density, rat density, and the probability of some drunk farmer spending his Friday nights plinking above ground infrastructure with his hunting rifle to keep prepared for deer season.

Since most ISP executives live in major cities, the idea of having to know how many racoons live in a service territory is, well, not part of any MBA program, and dealing with rural realities can stop them cold from investing in the vast stretches of the rural addons to the MTBF margin.

It’s not that ISPs don’t want to serve rural America, it’s more like they don’t know how to absorb the costs of serving rural America.

This is perhaps why wireless technologies are much more prevalent than fiber and cable technologies in some rural areas.? There are fewer delectable wires running around waiting to become tasty morsels.? This lowers the service costs dramatically, and makes it possible to serve areas with rural dining preferences.

Now I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t try to bring fiber to everyone, everywhere.? What I am saying is that sustaining the fiber may sometimes be too expensive, and sustainability is what keeps a network working.? So next time you hear someone declare that fiber is the only solution, think about it from the raccoon’s point of view, “should I taste the blue fiber first, or the red?”