I guess the real question is then: Does allowing home/business users onto the same network that manages the electrical grid a good idea (from an OpSec point of view)? Does this make it easier to hack the electric grid? What happens to the electric grid when the network becomes congested?
One would hope they would be physically segregating the network and using different fiber strands for SCADA vs home/business users. I would be nervous even if it was logically separated using something like vlans at layer 2; you're one bad configuration change away from possibly damaging consequences.
My thought is that this digs into the idea that they 'just decided to' offer Fiber-to-the-Premises after they realized that they had built a fiber network. Or is this a non-issue (i.e. adding new strands is trivial / cheap once the infrastructure is there or maybe SOP is to just lay lots of strands, because the strands are cheap)?
