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."

Comments

Good Idea

[dirkdidit]

This is actually a good way to get use of something that would otherwise just sit and decay.

Having fast internet and reliable forms of connectivity are important things businesses look for when they come to towns. Hopefully what this guy is doing can spur some growth there.

I wonder what else you could do with a steam tunnels. Live in them maybe? :)

This is a publicity ploy to get city money

[Dr. Spork]

Umm, I read the story and it seems pretty clear to me that this guy wants to butter up city officials so that they give him some money as an "investment" in the city.

If you've seen the episode of the Simpsons where Springfield gets a fancy monorail, you'll recognize immediately what this is really about. It's a con artist selling false hope using technobabble that probably sounds impressive to some provincial mayor in Amish country. Only a fool could think that all you need to bring in tech companies is a place for them to plug in. Luckily for these snake-oil-selling jerks, many of our leaders really are fools.

Re:Know something we don't?

[AlaskanUnderachiever]

Jesus, another "dark fiber" post.

I'm guessing none of you guys have ever DONE a cable/fiber install. You don't lay excess capacity for "future use". You lay excess capacity because no sane company wants to have to dig up a 2 mile stretch of trench to fix the line every time it goes dark.

It's not EXCESS CAPACITY. It's being cheap. You lay enough fiber that you should almost never have to dig it up to repair it again. Fibers go dark for all sorts of stupid reasons. Even in good installs.

The idea is to lay SO MUCH that you can always just switch over to another "good" line when one goes bad.

What's cheaper? The extra cost of the fiber initially or the HUGE cost in having to dig up the line multiple times to repair it?

Re:Duh ! Problem is

[virtual_mps]

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.

It's not indoor plumbing, it's a distribution system for a municiple steam system. The pipes are probably huge, not some little tiny things like you'd buy in a hardware store. The bend radius from outer wall to outer wall of the pipe, touching the inner curve of a bend, is probably not that tight.