Kakadu prevented Australians to complete a project to create a nationwide network infrastructure

In Australia, the National Broadband Network (NBN) project has been implemented for several years. Its goal is to provide high-speed access to the network of the overwhelming number of residents of this country. Like any project, in the course of its implementation there were problems. Some of them are expected, and some - not. Among the latter is the intervention of birds.



As it turned out, cockatoo, which is quite a lot in Australia, are interested in fiber, which is laid by engineers "through the air", in particular, with the help of towers. Birds damage their cables with their powerful beaks, so engineers have to constantly repair them. Among other protective measures is the metal sheath of the cable, which is expensive and takes time to install protection in all regions where the cockatoo lives.



The positive point is that most of the service cables in the bird's access area were originally protected by plastic shields. First of all, these are the channels that have already been put into operation. Kakadu is damaged mainly by the ends of fiber optic cables, which are left by engineers to connect new highways in the near future. And in this case, the cables are not protected.



It takes about $ 7,700 to replace one cable, which translates into multimillion-dollar costs on the scale of a national network. BBC journalists joked about the cockatoo: “This is Australia. If spiders or snakes do not get to you, then the cockatoo will do it. ”



Animals are a common cause of damage to Internet channels. The most active in this are the squirrels , who snack on not only Internet cables, but also power lines. Of course, thick copper cables are not able to damage proteins, but they destroy less significant elements of the infrastructure.





It is animals in the United States and Canada (for the EU, Russia, and other countries that data simply do not exist) that often cause blackouts, both networked and energy. Of course, it is impossible to name squirrels as a national disaster, but animals cause losses, and considerable ones. By the beginning of 2017, approximately 1,700 outages were reported in various regions of the United States and Canada, affecting a total of 5 million people.



There are no statistics on Australian cockatoo yet, but since the project leaders decided to take urgent measures, this threat is significant.