On July 3 - Around 9:00pm UH-ITS reported that the SX southern path from Hilo to Mauna Lani was down. UH-ITS was suspicious of a power glitch although it was never confirmed. In any case, no problem was reported by the observatories so traffic must have been rerouted to the microwave and it was probably brief since there were no bandwidth issues reported.
On July 27 - At ~12:10am GE connections between Oahu and Maui and Oahu and the Big Island were interrupted by a break in the Time Warner inter- island undersea fiber cable between Oahu and Maui. All UH traffic from the UH Maui College, Maui Research Technology Center, Lahaina Education Center, Hana Education Center, UH Hilo, Hawaii CC, MKO, and UH West Hawaii were automatically rerouted via the 155 Mbps microwave links. Priority was given to HITS traffic.
Time Warner restored all services by 2:35pm using fiber owned by Sandwich Isles Communications, Inc. It will take several weeks for the services to be restored on the Time Warner fiber cable.
On July 29 - Starting ~11:30am, a fiber cut west of Kapolei resulted in the interruption of the 10GE and DS3 ARCNet connections to Seattle. Oahu traffic was rerouted through the commodity link and the DREN connection. Big Island traffic through the SX southern path was not affected. Normal connections were restored at ~1:45pm.
On August 22 - The brush fire on the Saddle Road caused power failure at HP and on the Summit. However, we never lost our connection to the Summit which shows that the new UPS was doing its job. The router at HP and other equipment not connected to the new UPS were down briefly.
Hilo Fiber - As of 6/15, all Hilo facilities have been moved to the new fiber cables. As for the removal of the old fibers, Pui Hin suggested we wait until such time that the conduits need to be reused. The additional cost for the removal of the old fibers while installing new ones shouldn't be much.
The US Naval Observatory continues to work with UH-ITS to get GE connection to VLBA using Hawaiian Telcom service.
M3 is contacting Hawaiian Telcom to find out whether they have enough capacity on their copper and new fiber bundle installed for the DS3/GE services so that they need only to extend the cabling from SMA to the TMT site. For the MKOCN connections, additional fibers will need to be pulled from the Summit Communication Room to the TMT site.
According to notes and existing diagrams, there are plenty of conduits in the vicinity of the newer facilities. The most congested segment is between CFHT and Keck with only two 4" conduits. The MKOCN fiber cables for IRTF, Keck, Subaru, and SMA, are in one conduit with no subduct. The Hawaiian Telcom fiber and copper cables for Keck, Subaru, SMA, JCMT, and CSO are in the other conduit. If our notes and diagrams are accurate, only one 1 1/4" subduct is available and it is in the Hawaiian Telcom conduit. IfA, M3, and Hawaiian Telcom planned to meet on the Summit in two weeks to verify the condition of the conduits.
In the meantime, Pui Hin wants to find out from the observatories what they would like to see to provision for the future. She does not see the need for additional communication cables other than that for the TMT. However, needs for non-communication fibers will most certainly arise. One option might be, instead of using up the last 1 1/4" subduct for the TMT cables, we will pull a new bundle of fiber cables to all the observatories including TMT and clear out the 4" conduit housing the current MKOCN cables for future use. On the question of how many fiber strands should be pulled to each observatory, the unanimous answer was eight, as we currently have. There was no interest in additional fibers between HP and the Summit. One last question Pui Hin had was how congested the conduits are into the observatories, and asked everyone to check into it and let her know.
Last updated September 13, 2010 by by Miranda Hawarden-Ogata