This morning I woke up and headed to my bomb shelter to grab the bike pump to inflate the tyres on my children’s bikes. The handle got slightly tangled up in the fibre optic cables so I lifted up the cables to free the pump.
Like cookie crumbs the fibre cable’s sleeve jackets crumbled in my hands.




Before I could even utter “Oh fuck no”, another section of the cable exploded outwards with thin metal wires jutting out from what seems to be like strands of white plastic threads, which I assume is the Kevlar sheath. I think I must have stood in my pseudo server room in shock for a whole minute, unable to move or process what had happened. A main component of why I was in sheer horror was the fact that I had stupidly buried all of these cables under my cement flooring in PVC trunking from my shelter to all of the rooms in the flat. If this cable fails, the connection from the server room to a specific room would be permanently severed. The room for this particular cable turned out to be my home office where my homelab MS-A2 resided.

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A homelab enthusiast discovered their armored fiber optic cables physically disintegrating after 3.5 years of storage. The cables, purchased from FS.com and buried under cement flooring in PVC trunking, crumbled when touched due to being kept spooled with a tight radius. The failure revealed that armored cables aren't meant for movement and should have been connected to a patch panel instead. Despite attempting repairs with electrical tape, the handling caused additional jacket failures and likely fiber strand damage. The compromised cable still functions but shows reduced performance (6-7 Gbps vs expected 10 Gbps), and the remaining unused cables appear likely to fail similarly.

My Home Fibre Network Disintegrated, Literally