Much more detail in The Guardian article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-c...
Seriously, invest into a second wire going overhead. Perhaps a third going a slightly different rout just incase.
"An elderly Georgian woman was scavenging for copper to sell as scrap when she accidentally sliced through an underground cable and cut off internet services to all of neighbouring Armenia"
Emphasis mine.
Pulling up unused copper cables for scrap is a common means of making money in the former Soviet Union. Some entrepreneurs have even used tractors to wrench out hundreds of metres of cable from the former nuclear testing ground at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.The point I was trying to make was that whoever lays "critical fiber optic cable" in a way than an elderly lady comes with any kind of a tool, should be put to trial instead of poor woman who is probably living in poverty trying to survive.
Update: Checking Railway Telecom site http://grt.ge/?m=static&s=5 (here for the interactive map: http://grt.ge/?m=static&s=6) looks like it's an optical network based on CWDM equipments with links that provide a bit more than two 10GE between the nodes, definitely not a top-notch network. Automated path protection facilities couldn't even be available for networks of this type.
Update 2: Just noticed that the two bigger 10GE paths create a channel only from Poti to Tbilisi, so bandwidth for communications between internal nodes is provided by the other links (slower optical links and the ethernet ones (copper? hm) shown on the map).