Yesterday, a cable was accidentally cut during the works for the construction of the third lane of the highway A4 and caused the complete interruption of the Internet service in a wide area of the plain of Friuli.

From Lignano Sabbiadoro to San Giorgio di Nogaro, in Northern Italy, leaving all Internet users disconnected and forcing the carrier's technicians to work late at night to arrange a temporary fix. The damage is indeed serious and more time will be needed for a permanent fixing. Among the cut cables, there were also the ones pertaining to GARR high-capacity link between Milan and Trieste. Luckily enough, it was possible to minimise the service disruption for the research and education network users affected by the problem, thanks to the prompt action of the NOC and Operations departments and the collaboration with the Slovenian R&E network ARNES and the European backbone GÉANT. This precious collaboration make it possible for Trieste to be reachable again, albeit through an unusual path, in less than 2 hours. “Trieste is interconnected to GARR network with a double link, but in that point both fibres lay just next to the highway path. It is not casual that in our plans for the evolution of the network in this region it is foreseen to fully differentiate the path of these two links. Thus, when the cables were cut, both links went down” explains Marco Marletta, Access Port Manager for GARR network “in order to fix the problem we immediately contacted our colleagues in ARNES and GÉANT and in less than 2 hours we set up a layer 2 VPN which reached Trieste through Slovenia and the European backbone”. This solution shows the usefulness of investing on Cross Border Fibres with our neighbours and more generally of collaborating with the other R&E networks. With ARNES, in particular, there were plans to create a more stable mutual back-up solution and the occurrence of this accident is demonstrating the value of this idea..