With Connectivity Restored, Police Searching for Bay Area Telecom Vandals
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Police had no suspects early on April 10, although it has been speculated by some authorities that the vandalism might be connected with a labor dispute. About 110,000 AT&T workers nationwide have considered going on strike. Five regional union contracts expired on Sunday, April 5.
Connectivity was restored April 10 to tens of thousands of land
line, cellular and Internet customers of several telecom companies in
the San Francisco Bay Area following the vandalism of underground fiber-optic telephone and Internet cable lines at four locations on April 9.
AT&T pledged a $100,000 reward, which was increased to $250,000 later on April 10,
for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the
perpetrators of the felony vandalism. The crime disrupted service to
tens of thousands of people in five Northern California counties.
AT&T asked people with information on the crimes to call (408) 947-STOP.
Law enforcement officers had no suspects early on April 10, although it
has been speculated by some authorities that the vandalism might be
connected with a labor dispute.
About 110,000 AT&T workers nationwide have considered going on strike, according to TMCnet.com,
a news site for the telecommunications industry. Five regional union
contracts expired on Sunday, April 5. A sixth that expires a few months
later is being negotiated at the same time, the site reported.
The major disagreement between AT&T and the Communications Workers of America has been increased health-care costs.
Portions of the city and county of San Francisco and the counties of
San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito, where a number of IT
companies are located, were affected by cut telecom lines at two
locations in South San Jose. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint Nextel and
T-Mobile land line, cellular and Internet service was down in those
areas beginning from about 2 a.m. to 11 p.m. on April 9.
In San Carlos, about 25 miles north of the south San Jose vandalism
site, lines belonging to Sprint and Verizon were disabled at two
locations along Old County Road at about 3:30 a.m. PDT, a San Carlos
police spokesperson said. Those lines were also restored late in the
evening.
Repairmen had to physically fuse hundreds of hairline fiber-optic
strands in each of the four locations in order to restore the phone and
Internet connectivity.
The Santa Clara County Office of Emergency Services said the outage
killed cell phones and Internet access and about 52,000 Verizon
household land lines in south Santa Clara County and Santa Cruz County
for the entire day.
The telecom company announced the reward via the ATTnews Twitter site April 9 and was continuing to post updates on April 10.
Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
