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A Twisty Maze Of Sewerbot Links, All Different
skids writes "Look before you sit! Sewer systems all
over the world are under seige by robots laying fiber to the curb -- and
beyond. There's even a standards body forming. (Doesn't that consitute a one-level recursion of 'pipes carrying filth'?)" It's been a while since we last mentioned these things.
... a maze of twisty little passages, all alike?
Anyway, I'm glad it's robots doing that, there's no way on earth I would go down there!
RickTheWizKid
IP over rodentia carrier?
BR RickTheWiseAss
Until a wrong turn has a battlebot crawling out of your toilet with cable laying on it's mind.
Look before sitting? I do half my dirty work standing as it is, how bout, just don't sit!
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
"fibre optic cable laying robot". yeah, sure. we all know that robot + fibre optic connection = high bandwidth voyeur cam.
What will happen when the crocodiles attempt to eat these robots? Will we see lawsuits filed by crocodile protection groups?
Alternatively, couldn't we save money and persuade the Mutant Ninja Turtles to lay the cables? They've had nothing to do since the show got cancelled. What a group of lazy bums, especially that Splinter geezer!
It's been a while since we last mentioned these things.
:)
In other words it's a dupe in slow motion
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The bad part about this, is that the fiber will be easy to access for people who would like to do bad things to it, like chop it in half. Right now, most fiber is buried and terminates in locked buildings/closets/etc. But simply lifting a manhole cover gives an attacker access.
A few years ago, there was a guy in Fargo, ND who wanted to rob a stereo shop called Site On Sound. The shop had an alarm system, so instead of just chopping the wires on the outside of the building, he obtained some city blueprints and found where the largest bundle of phone wires went, and cut it in half with a chainsaw. Apparently, it was a 2 foot thick bundle of twisted pairs, and the entire city of Fargo was completely without phone service for nearly a week while the 2 foot thick cable was spliced back together.
Hope they don't plan on running anything too important over sewer fiber. It's cheap, but it has far greater risk than burying it.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
These sewer bots must be very resiliant animals indeed if they are to contend with the poo and filth of the sewers. I wonder if this same rugged sewer bot technology could be used by NASA or the military?
The sewer seems like such an foul environment, with numerous bacterias and small animals. Seems like a fiber laid in the sewer has a greater chance of being severed than one that's laid in dedicated pipes. What's preventing Joe Sanitation worker from cutting or tripping over these fibers?
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Some say its an urban legend, the stories of robots flushed down the toilets when they were just mini-battle bots, all grown up to huge proportions and laying fiber all over the city. But I know its true! I accidentally flushed by Lego Mindstorms down the toilet one day and now I have high speed internet access when I crap!
.sig: It's what's for dinner.
Figure 6 of the japanese link (the word world in the summary) explains how that was setup!
--Answer this question while on the john
Sex - Find It
That's why there's redundancy in the links. Fiber connections always have two or more links going through physically distant paths. Too many uninformed people operating backhoes around every city.
IP over rodentia carrier?
Nope, but there's IP over carrier pigeon.
Sewer lines are dirty, nasty confined places, do we really need the roto-rooter guy taking out our broadband connection?
Everyone sees roads continually being torn up to lay cable. Why don't the municipalities lay a "data pipe" to go along with the gas and sewer lines.
That way, there's a maintained pipe for power and data to run down. The city rents space, and you don't have roads being torn up anymore. Instead of once per carrier per service, it's torn up once period! New services become a _lot_ cheaper because you don't have to pay to repave the roads!
Cities would love it because they get a steady income, companies love it because it doesn't involve insane amounts of capex... Win all around?
Jason Pollock
These robots reminded me of W.I.S.O.R., a robot built by Honeybee Robotics to repair the ancient steam pipes under New York's streets.
Very interesting to anyone reading this would be a docudrama about the creation of W.I.S.O.R. This is a cross between Pi, 2001, and Junkyard Wars.
Of peripheral, yet substantial interest is Honeybee's RoboTender, a robotic bartender.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -A. Turing
I don't want even a small cable to reduce my sewer bandwidth...
I'm fat, you're ugly. I can get slimmer, and you?
http://saveie6.com/
Oh, great. So now we have to install crappers in the meeting rooms to get the LAN access.
The upside is, no more toilet breaks.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
No! It's, "In Soviet Russia, fiber lays robots to the curb!" The idea is to reverse the subject and the object. "You" does not enter into it unless one of those is "you," "I," "me," or "us."
" I don't want even a small cable to reduce my sewer bandwidth..."
Switching to a low fiber diet will help.
Yeah, but fiber can get wet and not short out, since its pulses of light and not electrical signals.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
it's a real shitty connection :P
(sorry, i couldn't resist)
No wonder the service stinks.
It would seem that this is a convergence of policies for the former US President and VP. Clinton wanted to make healthcare more affordable and/or free, and Gore wanted to route the internet to everyone's home, business, or public meeting place. With this system you can get the internet and a free colonoscopy at the same time!
Any of you who've been subjected to a sigmoid colonoscopy would know that you can't tell the difference between a robot shoving a fiber optic bundle from a physician shoving the fiber optic endoscope up there.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
It cost more to dig up the streets and lay your 'data pipe' then the pipe can generate income over an acceptable period of time. Sure a city could amortize it over 100 years, and _might _ make a profit on the money equal to some other investment they could have done with the money, but there's no guarantee in 100 years this data pipe of yours will still be as usefull. Too risky, too costly, there are better ways to put tax dollars to work.
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Otherwise I feel incredibly sorry for the techs that have to fix that.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Why should we put money into developing robots to do this work.
Couldnt we just ask the lawyers to do it while they are down there ?
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
There are frequent news stories about the damage that underground cable installers sometimes do to sewer mains, etc., causing people's basements to be flooded with human waste.
I read an article about it very recently (I think it happened in Austin, TX), but kind find an online reference. This google cache of a page seems to list lots of similar cases, though.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
However, it is kind of fun coming out of the sedative-induced haze. I wanna take those drugs home with me :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
What is music when you despise all sound?
...you might be eaten up in a gruesome corporate takeover!
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
What happens to that fiber during periodic sewer maintenance? I can just imagine what those roto-rooter blades will do to your connection!
Human decisions were removed from strategic defence. Sewernet began to learn at a geometric rate...
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
That said, I better get to work on a new packet filter. ;-)
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Well the standard says "avian carriers" - owls would fit the bill just as well as carrier pigeons
How exactly, do you service a sewerpipe once it has fiber running through it?
-ted
You see, my house is located on the side of a hill, and it's actually lower in elevation than the sewer line on the street. I use an ejection pump to move the shit from a storage tank into the sewer. There is a valve in the sewer line just up from the ejection pump that prevents poo from the sewer from flowing the wrong way and erupting from the toilets. I wouldn't be very happy if a little sewer robot was going along saying "OK, 6513 is next to get a fiber connection. Hey? What's this? I'll just prop this little door open while I run the fiber line."
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
From the comments it seems like people are only seeing the comical side to all this. In countries with established broadband networks it would have an uphill fight getting established. Where it will probably make inroads, is in towns around the world that don't already have a cheap highcoverage broadband infrastructure. The cost per mile figure is the one to watch, point being is sewage companies all ready use robots to inspect sewers in many countries. If the muncipal sewerage companies see that they can increase their revenue by using this technology, without an enormouse outlay of capital they will pitch their prices to beneath the prices of existing methods and money talks.
I remember when they cabled my area, the cost must have run into millions, all those trenches, don't come cheap in terms of man hours. And is reflected in the price I pay for my broadband connection, those loans have to be paid back, plus interest.
There will obviously be technical problems but technology usually finds ways around such things, padlocked manholes and such. Also by doing this we might end up with a better system of sewers, less effluent escape in to ground water would be a good thing, by putting the cable laying robot into the sewer means you can inspect the sewer as well as lay the cable.
It will be price that will have the final say, especially in other countries that do not have a hangup about bodily functions
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
.. the big concern now isn't backhoes ripping up cables, it's too much bran cereal in one's diet doing the damage.
Trolling is a art,
...and perhaps it shouldn't be.
... terrorists, and how they could use 'em.
But the first thing I thought of when I read the article and saw a picture of the robot was
Tell me I'm paranoid.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Haha!
When I saw their logo, with the 2 large "C"s, I first thought it said CueCat!
I thought, "That's ironic, that's the same name as that OTHER company with a shitty business model!"
http://kered.org
Does anyone else here think it would be cool to just have one of those robots? Think of the inherent untility of having a smaller version fo one for running cables inside your own home, and the joys of attaching stuff to it so it could scare your relatives out of the house when they have overstayed their welcome!
Robots rule!
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
One of the articles mentioned a bot 6" round, 36" long. Another was 6 feet long and 8" around.
And they are intended to lay cable in pipes that are that small. So how do they go around corners?
I also wonder what happens when a fault develops in the line, in a inaccessible (can't dig it up) location. Do they rip it all out and put a new one in?
A lot can be told from a person from their waste. You can tell what they eat, what kind of health they're in, what kinds of drugs are in their systems and if they're pregnant.
It wouldn't take much to plant small sensors that could detect these things and more. For that matter a microphone could be run up the trap of your sink and you would never know it was there (how often do you take apart the trap?)
As we begin this new age of homeland security and goverment paranoia, I saw something like this coming a long time ago. I bet we're not too far from law enforcement using these types of robots in survelience. To a judge, it shouldn't make any difference if a person goes inside a house and plants a wireless mic, or if a robot climbs up the sewers and does it.
And these things are laying a network medium as they go, no problem reporting back to base what they've found.
Think about that for a moment, then mod me.
Insituform puts robots into sewers routinely. They have a clever technology for relining sewer pipes from the inside, without digging.
Wife: "Honey, there's some kind of robot coming out of the toilet - there's a weird-looking cable in it's mouth and -- (screams) it looks like there's an Alligator right behind it!"
Man (bored, not really paying attention): "Yes dear. I'll be in to squash it in a minute, just let me log off Slashdot..."
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I think it's safe to say that thanks to these sewer-fiber-laying robots, all this plumbing is finally becoming "interactive".
This technology brings a new danger with it. What is to stop a person (or a robot-operator?) with malicious intent from splicing the (easily accessible) fiber and installing his/her own repeater station? All the traffic would be theirs....
The other obvious danger, of course, are the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Suddenly all that porn surfing doesn't seem so inappropriate anymore.
Sewer systems do rely on gravity --to get them to the nearest pumping station. Now where do you go? Wastewater stations are usually in some low lying area, some are close to or even inside a 100 year floodplain. Is this really a good place for a fiber switching center?
Several of you mentioned that sewage leaks in to the ground water. Uhh folks, it goes both ways. The term we use for this phenomenon is infiltration and inflow. Often the problem isn't leakage in to the ground water, it's leakage of ground water in to the sewer and overloading wastewater treatement plants. Problems include tree roots cutting through sewer pipes, shifting soil, and pipe deterioration. I'll be impressed if a robot can negotiate all of that. We have enough trouble getting our sewer pipe TV cameras in there to investigate blockage problems.
Someone is going to have to convince the sewer company that this extra volume of fiber in the sewer pipe isn't going to cause additional grease buildup, and isn't going to restrict flow. Many new and even the not-so-new suburban areas are stressing the capacity of existing sewer systems well beyond original design limits. Unless the system is very well maintained (it almost never is) or the pipe is very new and well below designed flow limits, I don't forsee many companies agreeing to this.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!