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Internet Access Via Pneumatic Tubes -- Whooosh!
selectspec writes: "Old pnuematic tubes used for delivering mail in 19th century cities like New York possibly could be used as piping to hold new fiber lines. Accoding to this nytimes article the tubes were used to deliver mail through New York City via pressurized air in 1897. Now, an entrepreneur wants to use the tubes instead of laying new pipes which would cost upwards of 100 million dollars a mile in New York City." Pneumatic tubes have been ahead of their time for over a century, so it's cool to see some of their inherent latency problems can be overcome by creative re-use.
Looks like in Italy (more precisely in Rome) we have the copyright... look at this: www.ebiscom.it/news/comunicati/txt_stampa_com502.h tml
At a point, they say:
"Due mesi fa, FastWeb si è aggiudicata la
gara indetta dalle Poste Italiane per l?utilizzo della rete di posta pneumatica al fine di
cablare il centro di Roma con la fibra ottica..."
Ok, I translate:
"Two months ago FastWeb won the contest for the use of the pneumatic mail network, with the aim of wiring the center of Rome with optic fiber..."
I think for this application, greased ferrets might be more effective than pigeons. Time to amend the RFC...
At least if we go to ferrets, we can say that the Internet not only sucks (and blows), but bites as well.
This idea has a solid historical base. A company named WilTel uses decommissioned oil pipelines as conduits for fiber optic cables. They began in 1986. WilTel was sold, and I do not know what has become of it. I believe WorldCom acquired much of the network. Regardless, decommissioned tubes are fiber optic conduits waiting for use.
for whatever reason, BGSU decided not to use their existing tunnel system (crawl spaces w/nice hatches) and instead made trenches all over campus to lay the new lines.. They said it was more economical to do that than to try and figure out what wires were what...
:) Although, "Winston" may be against that... ;-)
Personally, I think that the pneumatic tubes would be a nice idea, but probably just as difficult..
What they *should* do is use old subway lines as roadways...
What's interesting is that a lot of old infrastructure has been used to lay fiber-optic cable in cities.
Because fiber-optic cables tend to be much more tolerant of bad external conditions than copper cables, it's small wonder why old sewage systems and the old pneumatic tubes mentioned in the article are being used to run fiber-optic lines. After all, many railroads made a ton of money using their right-of-way land to run copper and later fiber-optic lines (Southern Pacific was famous for doing this--that's how the modern Sprint communications company was born).
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
If you don't have direct line of sight, you'll never get a signal through (there are a lot of phone cells in NYC.)
Even at that, there is so much echo and shadowing, you can't get a clean signal through without such a performance degradation that its useless. (Its okay for voice quality but that's it.)
In a big city like NYC, Tokyo etc. you're either using cable for your TV signal or you don't watch it.
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By chance, yesterday, I saw a crew busy working at a railroad crossing. They had a hi-rail truck and a hi-rail crane, with a portable compressor.
A strange contraption connected to the compressor was sucking cable from a big spool (very fast, at about 1m/s). What was surprising was the nearly silent operation of the thingamajig along with the compressor (they usually make a lot of racket).
I suppose that the thing blows air in the tube, and the fiber cable is sucked along with a venturi effect.
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I believe he's talking about using this to wire buildings that already have an old pnuematic infrastructure...
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They mention that back in 18xx they tested the system by sending a live cat in a tube. I wonder what would happen if we sent a troll through the system? Hopefully there would be plenty of breaks and obstructions.
BTW - just for clarification, idiot, they are using the *existing* tubes in New York City, where it is nearly impossible to run any new lines... the city is built layer upon layer upon layer, and nobody is really sure what does what underground. The classic restaurant in New York has a bathroom that is in the corner, go down the stairs, 100 feet down a cooridor, down some more stairs, make a right, 50 feet across, and the bathroom is five feet up.
Now picture a few square miles worth of these labrythine tunnels in 3D, with sewer, subway and other services running between them, and you'll realize how much easier it is to use existing pipes than try to go through what is necessary to figure out who to pay, who has rights and where you should dig to lay new lines.
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Evan
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Makes sense. Why not reuse? People seem to be making remarkable efforts with domestic recycling and waste management, it only makes sense that governments do the same -- and it will cost taxpayers less money in the process!
Here's an idea: we build pyramids instead of graves. Sure it will cost the taxpayers and businesses more, but think of the extra money we can pay to the workers!
There's plenty of work for contractors to do in NYC, and the pipes can be exposed and repaired later. Give me a break!
And what do you think the difference between an old,rusty iron isulator for the fiber cable is and a new, shiny plastic one? Neither will be truly functional, just space holders to keep the other stuff out of the fiber system.
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It *has* to be a mistake. Fibre installation typically costs $100,000 per mile
Even that sounds expensive but, don't forget that you not only have to dig and bury the cable. You also have to acquire a ridiculous amount of permits and you have to buy/lease the right of way. That's where the big dollars go.
The actual cost of whatever your laying is trivial compared with the cost of the trench. That's why you'd typically see lots of ductwork being installed.
So, if these old pneumatic tubes aren't useable, or don't go where the fiber is needed, what prevents some smart outfit from making a tunnel boring machine that digs a tunnel just big enough to run optical fibre?
At least as expensive as using a shallow trench. You need to take care to avoid existing tunnels, ductwork, cables, etc.
It would make rather a mess for a TBM to chew through a pipe carrying water or gass, if you hit an electricity cable or train running tunnel then you'd also need a new TBM.
Firstly, are those tubes still in good condition? They've been unused for decades--they might be full of rainwater, sewage, etc.
The expensive bit is digging trenches to lay new ducting, getting rainwater/sewage out of some old stuff costs far less.
Secondly, would the tubes have to be converted in any way at all?
Typically underground fibre is fed through tubes around 2mm internal bore (or rather blown through with compressed air). Several of these are bundled together in a tough sheath then fed through ducting. The tubes simply serve as ducting, only issue is that they are probably a different size from modern ductwork.
Thirdly, are the tubes still readily accessible? Right now, I'm thinking of the old subway tunnels in the District of Columbia and New York City. Some of them are still down there, but the entrances/exits have long been sealed.
Boring a shaft could easily be cheaper than digging a trench over the same distance...
100 Million per mile?
How did they get that? Wouldn't a good wireless system be much better than even laying down fiber?
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I'll say. There might be latency problems, but never underestimate the bandwidth of a stream of MRAM chips hurtling your way. ;-P
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My office is in one end of a hospital, which is still equiped with tubes. The hospital is about 30 years old, so the use of tubes isn't ancient.
The tube station I've seen was in the maintenance department, used mostly for zipping plans and specs about. The canisters were about 18 inches long, with rubber-stopped ends.
The stations are controlled by 70s-battelstar-gallactica-like buttons, knobs, and lights, used to select the destination of the torpedo.
The air can still be heard wooshing through the ducts.
The first thing I thought of, when reading the story, was Terry Gilliam's movie, "Brazil."
When will we have Robert de Niro zip-lining into people's apartments to fix their networks without a 27B-6?
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This reminds me somewhat of the first implementation of the avian IP network discussed earlier in this forum.
There seems to be a great deal of potential for using pneumatic tubes as part of IP network.
Right off I can think of one problem though. If I were to load my tube with a nonstandard payload, of say a bunch of "holes" (the variety that is produced by a 3-ring punch) or the ever favorite chads then my recipient would likely suffer from packet fragmentation in a big way.
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Those pneumatic tubes are made of cast iron that has been oxidizing in New York's ground for over a century. Let's just say you COULD snake your cables through those corroded pipes, get past all the cracks and breaks, and make your way to where you want to go. Your destination had better be a post office, 'cause that's where those old babies take you. Seems to me, though, that unless you're expecting to move PAPER through your fibers, a phone company central office would be a much better bet for terminating your telecom lines.
Whoever said "there's one born every day" grossly underestimated the extent of the problem.
<bart
100 million a mile? That doesn't sound too realistic. Is that supposed to be just for new pipes or for new pipes and fiber optics. If that's how much it costs to do things no wonder DSL and stuff like it fails. Maybe they should rethink their buisness plan if it costs 1/10th of a billion dollars to dig up the ground and put down metal and glass wire for 1 mile.
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People would like to close their eyes so that a huge problem would disappear without having to deal with it, and then they dress this up as a 'solution' and say they're 'saving millions of dollars per mile' for their cabling project.
Think about this, New York is a festering hive of who-knows-what, layer upon layer of cabling, pipes, electrical conduits, and other miscellaneous detrius of centuries of city living.
New York has been the most densely populated 'modern' city for quite a long time, and by that I mean all the little things like electrical and water access everywhere, etc.
In the past when something broke, they pathced it, instead of doing a more thorough fix, they just paved over a huge sinkhole in a road without looking into why it sunk in the first place, they just pile more new crap on top of the old crap until it's impossible to sort out what lies under the surface.
Now someone want to use an ancient (by modern standards) system, in whatever unknown condition it is in, and try to make a new utility out of it. People are going to come to depend on this utility like they depend on electricity and water, but the infrastructure being used to build it is already over a hundred years old.
'We don't want to dig up the city' they say, 'it'll cost too much money'.
Yes, it will cost a lot of money, but you know what? That money will actually go stright into the economy, workmen will have jobs to go to for the next decade; city infrastructure will be vastly improved as old pipes and cabling are exposed and replaced as their condition is shown; perhaps a new design in city infrastructure management will be put in place so that the same problem doesn't happen again, we could make the entire city of New York what the Epcot Center was supposed to be.
Do you people not have vision at all? This could be the spark for the largest urban redevelopment project ever attempted by humankind, but all you people can do is put your hands over your eyes and carry on the chant 'Do it the cheap fast way!'.
Your lack of vision disturbe me.
If people are interested, Standage's "Victorian Internet" deals with pneumatic tubes a fair amount. They were a good complement to the telegraph for short distances since they were actually faster (skipping the encoding and decoding steps).
At the college I work for, we used our existing steam pipes to hold the fiber connecting buildings on campus...absolutely perfect conduit, and didn't require trenching (much) on our historic property. Plus, a bomb could level the school, and we'd still have network (although if no one is here to use it, is it really a network?)
The telegraph, the Victorian Internet according to the book of that name, suffered from the same "last mile" problem that the Internet today experiences. The answer then was another paired technology, the pneumatic tube system in cities.
Telegraphers in suburban or other city center locations, according to the book, could communicate directly with other telegraph offices. But it was impractical to have a telegraph office distributed for each business or residential user. Thus the message was communicated first by hand delivery to a telegraph office located centrally in the city, then transcribed by the receiving telegrapher, sent by pneumatic tube to a location near the recipient, and then hand delivered from there.
It was only the wide availability of telephones that destroyed both the telegraph and the pneumatic tube system. Western Union, for example, continued for some years to deliver telegraphs over the last mile via local telephony instead of hand delivery.
So using the pneumatic tube system is a strange echo of a proven old technology, one that we are usually ignorant of because we don't look at our history carefully.
One remaining question will be, are there sufficient concentrations of users (department stores or insurance companies, for example) at the endings of these pneumatic tube companies, or have they left for the suburbs? If the latter, maybe this will promote a return to a vital central city in places where such infrastructure has been preserved.
Thinking about this, I realized that this compares favorably with email, in that between meetings, and so on, the response times are similar. This puts a new light on the commerce of the early 20th century. However:
"the pneumatic service began to pale next to the new technology of the motor-wagon, which could deliver mail two to three times faster than a horse-drawn cart with equal or greater volume and more than 10 times the volume of a pneumatic tube, while only slightly slower."
Now that has gone to hell in a handbasket since then.
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Wow! Pneumatic tubes must be exactly what The RFC 1149 project needs. Imagine using these for LAN and corporate networks - add a few hundred pigeons, a barrel of grease and voila! High-speed CPIP communication.
^]:wq!^M
The building was built in 1994, they had the tube system built in. Put in your tube, pick a button and off it goes. Moves orders from the order desk to the wareheouse, to accounting and back again. Hell, my bank still uses them at the drive-thru...
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
. . . that if I stuff carrier pigeons holding IP datagrams inside of these pneumatic tubes that I'm tunneling?
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I don't think you quite understand. This is fiber optics we're talking here. Here at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) we have two OC3s. One for the internet and one for I2. An OC3 is a huge fiber optic cable. If you were to slice open the cable you would not only be in big big trouble but you would find an interesting cross section. Hey? Where's the fiber? It's a small little circle in the middle of a pile of insulation. Fiber optic cable carries so much data so fast you only need a small bundle of it to get super high speed access. It just requires a lot of protection because it is so fragile.
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Granted, in some cities the ATS right-of-way alone was valuable, but utilizing it required a great deal more than pulling new cable through existing conduit. In many large cities you can still find WU manholes right next to the Bell manholes, but I haven't heard of any cities where the WU conduit has been used extensively. Has anyone else?
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Internet Access via Carrier Pigeons... It'll be good for everyone in areas where there's no broadband schedualed for the next 5 years (like me, damn 56k, three hours for the Linux Kernel). Unfourtunatly it will be more limited to my Central Office than DSL. I'll have five "plans": One Pigeon with One packet at a time (2-300bps). 10 Pigeons with one Packet each. (20bps-3k). 1 Pigeon with 10 Packets (20bps-3k). 10 Pigeons with 10 Packets each (200bps-30k). Or for the Wealthy, the BroadPigeon option, 100 Pigeons with 10 packets each, (2k-300k).
Of course you'll be more likley to get closer to 2bps-2k but becuase someone MIGHT live next door to me I can advertise "Up to 300k Per Second!!!*" The more pigeons you have the more expensive it is but the more packets they carry the more chance one of them will faint and you'll get packet loss...
*Depending on how close you are to the Central Office of PigeonBand Inc.
--Volrath50
Why not attach the cable to a swivel on the back of a pneumatic canister, put it in the pipe, and pressure behind it? Unless the pipe has lost too much integrity, you could use the old tech to install the new tech - which might be poetic in its way.
Course I'm not sure if it has paid off for CP&L at least. They bought some local internet companies (like Interpath) but its been a strange story after that.
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That's what williams communications did (initally, before being bought the first time)... Well they used their old oil pipe lines, but same effect.
I'd prefer an uninterruptible coffee supply. Tubes would be the perfect solution.
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There are short-distance tube systems for drive-thru lanes at banks, drug stores, etc. I know some of the engineers designing these things, and they tell me they tried to design a system for fast food. Trouble is, it's extremely difficult to route the tube so the capsule will stay same side up for the whole trip, so drinks get spilled. (In most bank drive-thrus, the capsule goes up, turns 90 degrees, goes out, turns another 90, and arrives upside down.) When they got a working prototype, it looked more like a Lionel train set than anything. 8-) Forget about pizza -- quite aside from spillage, the bigger the tube, the harder it is to make the bends.
Don't you think that he should have the right to use this if he wants, considering he discovered it?
Well that depends. Suppose I visit your house and I find a long-forgotten baseball card in your basement which turns out to be worth several thousand dollars.
I'd want to say 'finders keepers', but you'd argue that it's your property, and it was found on your property. The fact that you forgot that you had it has no impact on who rightfully owns this.
Likewise, your government spent your tax dollars to build that system. It goes through government-owned land. Even if it was built a century ago, it doesn't change the fact that they paid for, and thus it's their right to decide what to do with it.
In any case, they should let the guy use it, but I don't think it's right to say that they're screwing him because they're not letting him use their stuff for free.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Dilligence is being done here. Abandoned infrastructure is commonplace in any installation, and if you can reuse it, you're saving resources and time that could be better spent elsewhere.
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Stuffing em full of wires is useless, lets use em to deliver junk people buy online. Hold on, I'm going to upload you a donut.
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Firstly, are those tubes still in good condition? They've been unused for decades--they might be full of rainwater, sewage, etc.
Secondly, would the tubes have to be converted in any way at all? Remember, the tubes are dead tech now. They weren't designed for cable, as that was still decades away.
Thirdly, are the tubes still readily accessible? Right now, I'm thinking of the old subway tunnels in the District of Columbia and New York City. Some of them are still down there, but the entrances/exits have long been sealed.
Cool idea, but due diligence needs to be done.
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they shoudl jsut run them on the subway lines. i have seen those tubes and they are pretty small. im not sure how much fiber you could pack into them, and it would only be around the downtown core which probably already has fiber. still nice recycling technique.
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Okay, So, I seem to get the impression from the article that this guy who spent all this time researching and essentially discovering this long lost tube system is going to get screwed out of its use. The director of Information Technology for the city was quoted as saying that this guy would have the option to bid on the use of this system along with everyone else! Don't you think that he should have the right to use this if he wants, considering he discovered it?
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