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Steam Heat to High Speed Internet
jrmski writes "Thom Greco, an astute businessman from the crumbling town of Wilkes-Barre is betting the future of its downtown on a new state of the art fiber optic network. He recently purchased the former Steam Heat Authority, and the underground pipes associated with it. The pipes provide clear advantages in connecting every downtown building with access faster than what's currently available in Philly."
"from the crumbling town of Wilkes-Barre"...
Wilkes-Barre is a (dead) coal-mining town; "As the stock market crashed in 1929, the coal industry struggled, but it never recovered after World War II. By the 1920's consumers gradually switched from coal to oil, gas, and electricity. One by one, the collieries were shutdown, and mine operators moved on to other enterprises, leaving the area with an unemployment rate in excess of 12% after the war..." (from this site).
Unfort, I think it's tough to turn towns like this around. Go see Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" (ignore his politics if you disagree with them - the message in the documentary is pretty important). He talks about how Flint tried to revitalize itself after an industry (auto) that it had grown all-too-dependant on shut down.
They sure are.
http://saveie6.com/
It's plumbing and the corners will be to sharp for fiber. If you could even manage to get a fish threw it you'll never manage to get the fiber pulled into it with the fish. But strait sections no problem it's the bends that will kill you. That's why conduit for electical wires is vastly different from plumbing parts. Fiber is going to be stiff. Trust me I've installed it. You'l never get it install in plumbing pipes. Plus imagine the rust and crud in the pipes. I'll pass on that job.
For those who don't know where Wilkes Barre is:
Here's a map
Metropolitan areas can run fiber much more effectively through the sewer system than by digging trenches for a few hundred miles. They've already done this in Indianapolis recently:
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http://www.citynettelecom.com/newsroom/show_rel
Being a resident of Pennsylvania in close proximity to Wilkes-Barre I've gotta say that it is not exactly crumbling. It may not have great downtown business at the moment, but neither does Bethlehem, which I think is worse off. This place has its own AHL hockey team too. It's not a big city, but definitely not crumbling.
"You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is...never try. Heh!" -Homer
Hah! The company I work for does. We also want our customers to dump Diet Coke on their phones, block the air intakes on their network hubs, and hire moron painters who spray EVERYTHING in the phone closet (KSU, 66 blocks, HDSL backplanes) a nice semi-gloss beige. We have one client so penny-wise and pound-foolish that they've insisted upon 2-pair wire runs instead of 4-pair because it was CHEAPER by 4 cents a foot. Of course, they had to pay for a SECOND installation of wire when the 2-pair turned out to be inadequate, but hey, they saved almost 40 dollars up front!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Many universities have done this same thing. I know Virginia Tech uses their still used steam tunnels to run fiber to the many buildings on campus.
That's why the Pittock Building in Portland, OR is one of the major telco central locations here --- it used to be a steam generation facility and there are pipes connecting it all over downtown that have been filled with cable for years now.
Hi!
The fellow who is promoting has a decent idea--albeit not an original one. The concept was promoted in Allentown (an hour south of Wilkes-Barre) almost two years ago. And prompted by some of the same ideas, the local power company (PP&L) developed a subsidiary to locate and light redundant fiber along some of its rights-of-way throughout northeastern Pennsylvania.
Two thoughts:
First, this is just a proposal--and a proposal that heavily depends (I'm sure) on state technology grant funding. Consider the last paragraph of the WNEP article:
Translation: Greco is fishing for a six-figure grant from the Pennsylvania Technology Investment Authority, and is hoping for support from the governor.
Second, just because he's fishing for a big grant doesn't mean that it isn't a bad idea. Several people have criticized this as a "build it and they will come" investment. Yeah, and so was the Interstate System. Which will go down in history as the single most tranformational use of federal government money in the history of our nation. (For fun--ponder the impact of building all those highways on the auto, steel, aluminum, glass, plastic, concrete, paint, and petroleum industries over the years.)
Using state economic development funding to develop IP-based infrastructure makes an enormous amount of sense. Adding another inch to the depth of pavement on a street in Wilkes-Barre isn't going to make a big dent in Luzerne County unemployment. But providing low-cost bandwidth might induce somebody to stay in town, rather than move his business elsewhere--or convince somebody in New York or Philadelphia to decide to locate his business someplace a lot saner (and safer), where costs are a low lower. In a sense, the question to ask isn't why they're doing it--the question should be, why haven't they done anything sooner?