Bored Oregon hunters switch to hunting the elusive Google Fibre

There was a time when bored hunters would look for roadside signs or line up bottle to shoot at when they were bored and couldn’t fine the meat type target to shoot at.

But this is the age of technology so just as other things change as we move into a more tech oriented world so to do the hunters look for more modern things to use for target practice during those boring times.

In the case of hunters in Oregon they have set their sights on the aerial fiber links to Google’s data center in Oregon which are regularly shot down by the hunters. After a few years of having to send techs out in the middle of winter to the middle of nowhere to fix these shot down links Google has decided to move them underground.

The search and advertising giant’s network engineering manager Vijay Gill told the AusNOG conference in Sydney last week that people were trying to hit insulators on electricity distribution poles.

The poles also hosted aerially-deployed fibre connected to Google’s $US600 million ($A635 million) data centre in the Dalles, a small city on the Columbia River in the US state of Oregon.

“What people do for sport or because they’re bored, they try to shoot at the insulators,” Gill said.

“I have yet to see them actually hit the insulator, but they regularly shoot down the fibre.

“Every November when hunting season starts invariably we know that the fibre will be shot down, so much so that we are now building an underground path [for it].”

Gill said that on one occasion, a snowstorm and avalanche prevented Google from transporting repairers and gear into the area of the cut.

Source: ITNews

image courtesy of Gizmodo