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It's 5 AM. Do You Know Where Your Robots Are?
aihacker writes "This New York Times article talks about a robot that lays fiber-optic lines in city sewers. What a brilliant way to bridge that "last mile"!" We've run a few stories about wiring (is that the right term for running fiber-optic cable?) cities for broadband, but the actual procedure is pretty interesting.
- to re-use an existing "cable-based" connexion (which is basically what Alcatel aimed the DSL technology at - FYI, I was working with them on that project).
- to use another kind of hertzian connexion in which case the impact on the cities infrastructure is far less important. I have also been working with an ISP whith whom we managed to set up a radio-based network in Arabia (with up to 40Mb/sec over 50 kilometers).
The final possibility would be to use the electrical network to communicate : There are actually some possibility to transfer data along with electricity with very good (xMb/sec) transfer rate.it seems that it was not widely developped in France because of the government reluctancy to have a company (Electricite de France) concurrencing one another (France Telecom)...
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
Simple wires. It's not like they're going through miles of pipes with that in one session, but from one accessible point to the next. So it's doable.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
I live in Omaha, despite being right dead in the center of the US, most telecomm bypasses us. It goes through Kansas City instead. It's not to far away, but still far enough to raise the cost of broadband alot. It's nice to see our medium size city finally getting some fiber installed to most of the buildings. There are alot of major companies in Omaha, this can do nothing but good in helping this city grow. I'm looking foward to it. Maybe I can find out more info on when they're doing it and check out one of the sewer funk covered bots ;)
On an unrelated note, a former spawn company of Inacom is building a data center in Omaha. I'm looking forward to being able to drive 2 minutes (really, it's down the street from my apt) to install a new server, instead of hopping a flight 1000 miles to where our servers curently are. It's to bad one of the major datacenter companies didn't do this first, they're going to miss out on the market. I just hope the racks don't cost and arm and a leg.
What kind of guidance are they giving these robots? Radio/camera or pre-programmed plan?
Wires... the trick is wires.
Article without registration.
:wq!
a robot that lays fiber-optic lines in city sewers, is that the right term for running fiber-optic cable?
Not on a first date. Unless the robot's a real machine (wink}
Now when the ground's shaking, you won't be automatically thinking that it's the subway.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
I have NOT read the article because of the whole req reg thing.
Just log on as user slashdot2000 and password slashdot2000. Or create a GWBush@whitehouse.gov account (password:nosecandy). There really is no need to use any real information.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
See this article in USA Today, dated last November. Contains a nice photo of the robot that will be actually doing the job.
Theyre running the wires through the storm water sewers, not sewage serwers. Everything in the storm water sewers is water/oil/gas/whatever off the road. You dont need to worry about the raw sewage touching your data.
Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw,
Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw,
And he never has the same problem twice.
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I like to watch.
There was a great article in mumblemuble about an extensive aerial mapping of New York that's just reached completion. Until recently, the civil engineering folks in NYC didn't even have a partiuclarly accurate map of the CITY, let alone the sewer system.
The new map used aeriel photography coupled with a GIS-type CAD system to produce a super-accurate (within a couple of feet) map of NYC's streets, buildings, bridges, docks and so on.
The kicker was that they wanted to make it publicly available, but the ubiqutous "law enforcement" (cue sinister music) didn't want it made public since they felt that it'd be an ideal way for "criminal elements" to pursue whatever it is "criminal elements do".
Anyway, given the relative age of NYC and the way it grew, I'm surprised they know where ANYTHING goes.
A major issue is that maybe you do have a plan of where the sewers are in relation to eachother but it is difficult to match up with what is on the street that may change, or indeed with other utilitiues diagrams.
The other issue is dimensional instability of paper. Plans are just not very accurate over a period of time because the paper can become distorted.
See my journal, I write things there
Not to mention "network congestion" or "packet loss" :)
Jilles
This gives IP a whole new meaning! :-)
(can't take credit for that one--one of our sys admins at work came up with it when we were discussing Citynet, who are laying fiber in Albuquerque right now).
Yeah, probably.
Also, on page 2 it notes that they place the fiber in steel conduits at the top of the sewer pipe "...well above the water's usual flow."
Although they didn't specifically mention if the conduits were stainless steel, they probably decided not to use the type of steel that dissolves when exposed to moisture.
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a robot that lays fiber-optic lines in city sewers. [...] a few stories about wiring (is that the right term for running fiber-optic cable?)
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The correct term is obviously "laying cable", which is why it involves sewers.
FP.
(is that just an English slang term?)
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Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Building/Housing associations in Helsinki have been doing this for a few years now. Basically everyone who wants it gets 10Mb/s ethernet to their flat, and it's switched in the basement onto fibre optics straight to the ISP.
The waiting lists for these flats (they're new flats) are 18 months long.
I hear that housing development companies in Stockholm (Sweden) have the same attitude as well.
FatPhil.
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Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Either that or a latent memory of the 3 Stooges episode where our boys are plumbers. Turn on the lights and the chandelier turns into a sprinkler system.
cat
So who gives a shit if a rat takes a byte out of a cable? Sorry, bad joke...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I don't know. Seems like a fitting way to send certain data if you ask me.
Don't click on the link...
See, I told you not to do it.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
He said for a few weeks he along with transit workers would begin late at night, early in the morning, and go step by step through the tunnels. I recall him saying it was a pain staking process since it carefully had to be set as to avoid any remote thought of all kinds of problems, kinks, high electrical interference etc.
The part of fiber optic cabling used for carrying information is completely dielectric, and thus impervious to electrical interference. Fiber is often used in power plants when normal wiring would do for that very reason.
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but ive been dropping fiber into the sewer for years. about an hour after each meal. "colon-blow, all the flavor, with 80x's the fiber" "...mom, i just shit a rope"
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
How about running cables by pet ferret? Costs only a few treats.
I could contract my three out to some IT companies and make a bundle.
When I move, they wont need to rewire my house for DSL, I'm moving right next to one of the switching stations and will plug my CAT-5 cable directly into their system!
I know of an ISP in Kansas City that did this, their building was right next to one of the main telco switches. It was rather nice, because when the telco screwed up, they could just go pound on the entrance to the building and yell at somebody in person.
Back on topic of this reply, broadband will always be a consideration for my housing, after having a cable modem I can never go back. I'd probobly have nightmares or something. (cringe)
At least in the UK, the phrase used in the industry is 'blowing fibre' - since compressed air is used to move the cable through the ducts.
Keeping up with everybody elses poor taste jokes: I reckon there's plenty of folk blowing fibre into the sewers already...
Anyway what I'd like to know is, what do they do about the rats? Rats are a major problem for cables, they have a taste for indigestible plastic. I can't remember the figures but in a large chunk of maintenance was because of rats chewing through cables. And if theres one thing I'd expect to find in sewers, its rats. Though seeing as its New York, maybe the alligators have eaten them all....
-Baz
well this would certainly give new meaning to the oft muttered phrase "the network is performing like shit today"...
Often guidance equipment is used above ground where the robot works underground. There are moles used in Australia to dig there way through dirt, under roads, around existing pipes and user quite sophisticated radar and sonics. Every now and then though, the little buggers get themselves trapped and have to be dug out. In the sewers I imagine it would be easier, just like the sewer pipe clears, they just get pushed through the pipe.
C.Burgess - email:colvinb@airnet.com.au
Slackboxen? Cool!
Sean
What's the deal? Is there some sort of rogue group of sewer builders secretly installing new runoff drains or something?
That's just wacky.
- Jonathan
IT IS 5:00 AM, AND YOUR ROBOTS ARE JUST FINE. NOW GO TO BED ALREADY.
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Who else finds this funny?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Rats are a big problem, and that's why many outdoor cables are armored. They've got a layer of polyethylene on the outside, then a layer of steel armor, then another layer of polyethylene, then fiber in the middle. If you read the PDF file here , you'll get a drawing.
It's manually guided. Uses a ~3cm dia. umbilical with video and miscellaneous telemetry feeds.
A funny but I almost missed in the article: The drivers of the poopmobile use the remote arm to kill roaches when they're bored. That would be fun as heck.
Brant
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo, Michaelangelo
Only problem is child labor laws for hazardous work -- remember these are TEENAGERS we're talking about!...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
And they don't need robots to do that.
Actually, a joint venture with the french railroads and the water company will compete with the PTT: they use railroad right-of-ways to lay cable between cities, they put the switches in train stations, and go the last kilometer though the sewers (also) used by the water company.
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In 5th grade or so, I went on a field trip to a sewage plant... I learned of some of teh stuff that comes through, and forgot most of the rest of the stuff. But, occasionally they get boards (from construction), chemicals, tree branches, etc... If the fiber optic cables are run in the sewers, they have a good chance, imo, of getting severed. And being in the sewers, you'd probly have to go in at 2 man holes, cut the piece off, and re-run the cable through there.. could get a lot more expensive than maybe just putting a connector there in the middle if it was severed. (I assume using robots because I assume sewers can't fit a human very well.)
overall, it'd probly cause more trouble than it's worth.
-DrkShadow
Electrical interference? With a purely optical transmission medium?
Asikaa
Asikaa
Come in, twenty-seventy-seventy, your time is up.
Why not send deepwater ocean cables through water pipes.
There's a whole range of technologies for putting stuff into the ground without disturbing the surface. The two main categories are schemes for re-using existing underground assets, and microtunneling. Both tend to involve some degree of teleoperation.
Kerr Construction has a good site on microtunneling.
So what happens when half time of the superbowl comes and everyone flushes their toilets? Does the Internet connection for half the city go out becasue of the high volume of sewage being pumped through the pipes? And Can you imagine the pain in the ass these would be for maintenance crews? I can just imagine the looks on some poor maintenance person as he crawls through sewage to fix a fiber line.
New York - are you kidding? The robots had better be pretty well-armed to deal with the Alligators in the Sewers. On the other hand, simply using alligators might do the job. Or alligator-shaped robots.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Re-read the article. Rings are laid inside the sewer pipe that have conduit clamps at the top. Steel conduit is then clamped to the rings so the conduit is running along the roof of the sewer pipe. Once the conduit is in place, pull wires are blown through the conduit, then used to pull the fiber through. You seriously thought they were running a loose fiber line throught a live sewer pipe??
That's not data that travels to my speakers?
You mean you 'cable' a digital line and 'wire' and analog one? I get it....
MediaOne ran a coax cable to my living room. I'm glad I told the technician I ordered Digital Cable, because he might not have know whether to 'wire' it or 'cable' it. What if he did the wrong one???
Do you 'cable' a DC power line? It is, technically, digtial.
If you want to dicuss semantics and etymology, don't try to invent your own rules.
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Perfect Team...
Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo, Michaelangelo
They work well in a sewer environment. Salary is pepperoni pizza. Very skilled with tools and have unique techniques to move effectively throughout the sewers. Only draw back is that appear only to only lay April.
Project Manager Splinter, gifted with experience and wisdom, this wily guy co-ordinates this freak team.
C.Burgess - email:colvinb@airnet.com.au
This gives a whole new perspective to the term "laying pipe".
ducking thrown tomatos
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
I hope those robots can perform any maintenance to those fibers. Otherwise I'd hate to be the guy that has to go down there and fix them.
However, someone at Mercury got smart. They remembered an ancient power distribution system: back in the late 1880's some factories ran on compressed air, pressurized to hundreds of PSI, and distributed through cast-iron pipes from central steam-powered compressor stations. Long since obsolete (shut down in the 1910's), the pipes were still in the ground!
So Mercury engineers built small robot pigs and used them to lay fibre-optic cables right through the heart of the capital city without digging up any roads -- using the pipe network that time forgot.
Now we hear about New York using the same system -- but of course, nobody remembers where it came from!
Ok, after reading the article and seeing that they ponderously crawl through the sewers to deploy robots to run fiber cables up through the bases of buildings, a somewhat obvious thought occured to me... Why don't they just flush the damn fibers down a toilet? figuratively speaking, of course, I mean why don't they just float the wire in the direction the pipes are running? They could set up at the sewer main for one of these buildings and deploy a rubber ball tied to an end of fiber. Then flood the system into the sewer. All they would need to do is retrieve the ball down in the larger sections of sewer, where one may walk upright at their leisure, in a hazmat suit. The only problem sounds like getting around a buildings slosh box, but I bet that task could be solved with a pump, a flashlight and a longish stick.
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
Do You Know Where Your Robot Are?
They are belong to us!
-Ciaran
If it's pulling fiber, why not hook the end of the fiber up for purposes of control (though I would guess it's actually pulling a 'pull string'.
I knew of a guy that used radio controlled toy tanks to pull wire in suspended ceilings and in subfloors. Another guy I heard about was using a crossbow with a fishing reel attached to lay deploy a pull string. He thought it worked great until he shot straight through some AC ducts.
carlos
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
-This sig intentionally left blank
Damnit, if I had been up earlier, I would have posted this myself. And I don't even have any mod points to mod it up. So I'll just reply and say kudos.
Do you have stairs in your house?
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
The article mentioned they were working in a 12 inch pipe.
Navigating in a pipe sloped downhill is fairly easy.
of all things, a 'blow job'.
The used to lay the conduit, cap up both ends, then send a burst of air through the conduit with an attachment at the front of the fiber. This would push the fiber through the conduit and it would stop when it hit the other end.
No shit, that's what they called in, at least in Colorado, in 1994/1995.
Aren't you glad you know that now!?
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Who needs WLAN card anymore? I want a toilet seat that has RJ45 connector in it!
This is the place where you write something that will make you seem like a complete idiot.
It lessens the need to rip up the roads and cause huge problems for traffic, as if DC didn't already have enough problems with traffic as it is. The little robots has a camera on it and a little arm which just sets up the wiring and has another tool which attaches it to the sewer pipe.
it's really cool, kinda similar to how some cable companies like Cox is laying down, or up, fibre. They just place a little utility on the wire with the fibre on the cable lines we see hanging above then it binds it to the line. Kinda cool thing.
I'm hoping to get one of those robots so I dont have to drill holes to put in more cables in my house ^__^
Man I should have written the article a couple weeks ago when I saw them doing it but couldn't find it anywhere.
When I was living in college apartments before they started wiring for Ethernet, we came up with serious plans to flush Cat 5 down the toilet to get a connection to the far side of the apartment complex. We figure, flush a sting down one toilet and the cable down the other, find a freshman to go in to the sewer and tie the ends together and pull it up on the other side. You'd have the minor inconvience of a small leak in the toilet seal but it would have been well worth it to share a t1 back in those days! "Please don't piss on the Cat 5."
--Let's hack root on 127.0.0.1 --panZ
It seems to me that using molemen to lay fiber optic cable would be cheaper than using robots.. they know the sewers better than any robot.
Can you imagine what the molemen must think as a robot passes them by at 5am?
-gerbik
Why not use the stormwater drain network instead of the the sewers? Cleaner, and altogether much better
I wonder who thought this up? I have NOT read the article because of the whole req reg thing. It seems to me that it makes sense to run it through sewers. Nothing really happens down there and so there shouldnt be a problem with anyone messing with them.
Now all they need is to do it everywhere, especially right next to my house, and then things would be good. I have friends that live in new gated communities with connection speeds about as fast as the T1 at my work which really sucks becuase they dont know crap about the potential they have.
When I move, they wont need to rewire my house for DSL, I'm moving right next to one of the switching stations and will plug my CAT-5 cable directly into their system!
Lord Arathres
stainless steel
Well I sure wish that they were helping me write a really boring essay on why Antigone is a good feminist. *shiver*
The NYT article likens the robot to a cross between a dachshund and a Hoover. Fitting, no?
Out of sheer morbid curiosity, I fed "dachshund" to Babelfish, asking for German to English translation, and got:
dogdog dog
Fitting, no?
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Well, at least the next time you see your connection speed drop after you flushed your toilet, you know what happend: more "traffic" down there.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
I can just plug the cable straight into my java ring-piece!
Because she didn't shave her armpits? Oh wait, that was from my high school essay on why so people think Antigone was from France. Sorry, can't help ya.
Cheers,
lets try this again, it crashed netscape last time.
What kind of guidance are they giving these robots? Radio/camera or pre-programmed plan? If it is radio, thats often a lot of rock and metal to go through, and radio isn't too fond of that. If it's pre-programmed, what contingencies does the program allow, such as a dead rat or a bird nest in the way?
It would be nice if they could do this in San Jose as well, but most of Silicon Valley used lots of pipes instead of large tunnels for their sewer system, (we came later so we learned from the mistakes in sewer design made in the east coast and europe, looks like we were a little short sighted) so I don't think they'd be able to put the fiber down there.
Drummer beat & piper blow,Harper strike & soldier go,Free the flame & sear the grasses,Till the dawning Red
Then again, maybe not.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
I had an ex co-worker who laid down Fiber for the New York Stock Exchange, and I remember him telling me the steps they took to do this.
According to him the New York City Transit Authority was paid a hefty amount of money to blow dark fiber through its train tunnels.
He said for a few weeks he along with transit workers would begin late at night, early in the morning, and go step by step through the tunnels. I recall him saying it was a pain staking process since it carefully had to be set as to avoid any remote thought of all kinds of problems, kinks, high electrical interference etc.
Blowing fiber through the sewer sounds like a neat idea, but I wonder how exactly is it set as to avoid any acts of nature such as, chemical compounds of all sorts of crap in the sewer which can affect it. (hint acids built up from excrement)
Its an extremely expensive task, and I wouldn't want to be the one down below doing it.
CIA bullies a Jew
360 degrees of Karma
FWIW it's cabling not wiring. You wire speakers or electrical outlets, but you cable a data path.
Please be patient, I'm a work in progress! --Alan Jackson
So now It'll be more than someone's gnutella client that takes a crap on my network.
--
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet
might be running loose in your pants."
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
I heard that same robot was also caught stealing old peoples' medicine.
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silence is poetry.
I can see it now: Bright yellow signs in public restrooms:
"WARNING:Fiber Optic Cable Below"
Call Before you Flush
1(800)GOT-TO-GO
"Get them before they get....
Yes. They are here to protect you. Please stand by the stairs so they can protect you. From the terrible secret of space.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I dont know what time zone your in, but in mine its definatly not 5:00 am yet
Wait a sec, what the hell am i doing up this late anyway?? Im going to bed.
-| My other ride is your mom |-