Going back to lwt42's previous post in this thread - there is a term "backhoe fade" because of the frequency of this problem.
A friend of mine and his late wife designed the first project that put people together in two remote locations. That was in 1977. One location was at Ames in Mountain View. The other at the Goddard Space Center in Maryland which was the location of the first NASA offices. Two groups of dancers - one in CA the other in MD - were to dance. As you can guess.. the delay made it tricky. Fortunately, they'd done a practice the day before the performance. On the day of the performance, a farmer was working with his backhoe. The super- secret, unmarked NASA cable was dug up. Fortunately, they had the tape of the rehearsal and could cobble together a demonstration video.
RACE Communications is laying cable for Internet service to PH and Phelan. Should we start a new topic on that? I'm very interested and would like to know experiences from neighbors/guinea pigs before I make the switch. And, yes.. we remember the 'backhoe fade' when one of their sub-contractors dug up a cable.
