> Squirrels obviously like a high fibre diet !
Mice in a telecommunications facility are a disaster. They'll eat
through fiber-optic cables and jumpers like crazy. The old telephone
wires used to be lead-sheathed. Lots of squirrels and mice died from
lead poisoning. The older stuff even had arsenic in it. But mostly,
they will chew on stuff that has metal sheaths or pull wire in it as
well as paper wrappings. We're slowly migrating to a newer style of
"riser cable" (fiber) that has no metal or paper in it at all. The
mice generally leave that alone as there is no reason for them to chew
on it. I would say that out of the 350 facilities I am involved in, we
experience a rodent problem maybe 10 times a gear. The "outside plant"
guys have to deal with it all the time and we probably have an outage
somewhere around the country three or four times a day. Of course,
further south, we have the snakes that make our field equipment home.
Fortunately, they do keep the mice away and don't chew on the wires.
But they are brutal on power supplies when they short out a -48vdc
main buss.
Fortunately, vermin within a facility aren't huge problems, but we
spend a fortune on extermination efforts. It doesn't take long for us
to find them as mice will start chewing the day they arrive. Unless
they are chewing on an old cable that hasn't been mined out of the
facility, the moment they sever something in use, we know pretty much
immediately.
FTTH (Fiber to the home) has got another set of issues when it comes
to critters. There are very good reasons why the industry is slow to
replace copper.
--
Ken Norton
ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.zone-10.com
--
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