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

Know something we don't?

[puppetman]

Dark fibre, the collapse of many companies that built these networks (and then had other companies buy them at pennies on the dollar), etc, then why do this?

Or maybe someone is thinking long-term; five-years, and maybe this will be a very valuable asset. Bah. Perhaps I need more foresight.

Re:Know something we don't?

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

""Thom Greco, an astute businessman from the crumbling town of Wilkes-Barre is..."

Man why is it when we have a story from one of our not so glorious Pa cities it has to be brought up like this. Any other city and it wouldn't be mentioned. I read that and just bowed my head. Growing up for me Wilkes-barre was the big city, drive north on route 6 for an hour and you will understand. Wilkes-barre ins't that bad.

I would personaly prefer to live there then anywhere in NJ, Philly, deap south, or LA cali.

I wouldn't say so

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

"Only good things can come from a tech visionary who purchases Old World infrastructure and is willing to run fiber to them."

I wouldn't call that an absolute. Look at the nightmare that Qwest Communications has caused. They're still using Pair Gain, in a city that is supposedly modern in design. We can't get DSL service in half of Phoenix that is within the copper distance needed to do it, and Phoenix was originally a US West Communications test city for the technology. I've had friends who couldn't get the phone company to install a copper circuit, and would not say who was responsible for Qwest's engineering decision to implement pair gain on every phone line.

So, I don't believe that companies usisng old-world, middle-world (not to be confused with middle-earth), or brand-new technologies are any better simply because of the tech. They have to actually provide service, not claim to be able to without delivering.

Re:I wouldn't say so

[The_Laughing_God]

Actually, though I understand you problem with such blanket statements, your example actually proves his point. Phoenix would be far better off if (as the original poster said) some entrepreneur had run fiber through existing conduits, instead of (as Qwest and many companies have done) tried to over-leverage existing infrastructure (twisted pair copper) for more bandwidth.

Fiber is a mature technology, whose properties and system design are very well known. It's been in use since the 50's, though it was too expensive and awkward to implement. Through improvments over the decades, the signal loss, noise, interrepeater distance, repeater design, durability, etc. have improved dramatically. Better manufacturing and the economies of large-scale deployment have also cut the cost per kilometer of fiber.

Pair gain is a kludge, originally intended for use on existing twisted pair, but often deployed by companies that didn't want to invest in in-house re-training, equipment, and other costs of moving to another medium (which often was, indeed a bit more expensive at roll-out, at the time) I don't know exactly when Pair Gain or its immediate antecedent technology were invented (it might have been the 50's, too) but twisted pair deployments were very different form each other, because each deployment had to accomodate the unique situation in each city, industrial park, etc. -- and these accomodations weren't always the best choice.

In short, Pair Gain (and several other twisted Pair techs) are not as mature as fiber, because there is less actual experience with any given style of deployment; and worse, it was originally meant only as a stopgap extension of an older technology, compared to pulling fiber and laying repeaters for a consistent, mature, intrinsically higher bandwidth solution.

Don't get me wrong: fiber has its addon "extender" technologies, too (multi mode multiple frequency, in-line laser pumped erbium amplifiers, etc.) but though these represent more radical changes than pair gain vs. POTS, I'd call them 'improvements', doing what (intrinsically higher bandwidth) fiber was always designed to do; while Pair Gain, etc. use Twisted Pair for things the original install never intended (or lay new twisted pair, knowing it is more limited than the (maybe) slightly more expensive, longer-term alternative, in an era when the quarterly bottom line was king.

To me th point of the article is that they DID lay fiber, instead of trying to leverage the old TP,

Better than copper

[rf0]

This is a good thing to see with people taking advantage of fibre. Here in the UK we are in the stupid position in that there is lots of dark fibre which was layed by British Telecom (BT), our telephony monopoly, but they have no product which can use it so we have to get (A)DSL over copper which works apart from those of us who live in the middle of nowhere

Rus

what if?

[MoFoYa]

what if those steam pipes had not been there?

would this guy have found another way to *connect* the town?

i guess what i wonder is: is his primary motive to create a fast reliable network so high tech business will enhance the town. or, has he stumbled upon a cost effective way to get high speed, marketable connectivity to a place that has never had it and is willing pay for it?

either way i suppose it's good for the community.
old steam pipes carry information as well as anything else.

I knew I'd heard this town's name before...

[orbital3]

Wilkes-Barre was featured in a previous Slashdot article when they decided not to renew their maintainence contract with IBM and their AS/400 with all of their tax records crashed... in light of that whole situation, unless Wilkes-Barre has done a technological 180 since then, I can't imagine what they'd do with all of this fiber.

Re:This is a publicity ploy to get city money

[transient]

Projects like this are in various stages of completion all over the country. In most of these undertakings, the goal is simply to make the city a more attractive place for new businesses (not necessarily tech companies). In particular, it can lower barriers of entry for telecommunications companies. Does it work? Nobody really knows yet. These networks are relatively new and so there's no significant data on their economic impact.

But a lot of cities are building these networks, so it's a real gamble not to. What if they turn out to be really valuable? What if they become a basic public utility? If that happens, then not having a fiber network will be like not having sewers.

Then again, all that fiber could end up just like those steam pipes -- abandoned and useless.

Re:Only Good Things

[inode_buddha]

Same goes for Buffalo NY area. It's an economic ghost town, been going downhill all my life. That's 35 years of losing. The fact that some of the original fiber (Sprint) backbone runs directly underneath downtown hasn't really meant much, even at the height of the dot-coms. From what I heard in my networking 101 classes, at least 1/2 of it is dark. Other than that, one of the original ARPAnet lines is nearby (appliedtheory.com). Again, no difference. The taxes and regulations here are absolute hell, let alone utilities. Hence, no business.

good luck!

[benny_lama]

I would not want to be the engineer responsible for putting inner duct and fiber optic into steam pipes. Think about this for a second......steam has no limitations on how pipes are connected, what the radius of bends is, putting a Y in the pipe line, etc. However, fiber does have all kinds of limitations. I've seen people try to shove inner duct and fiber down a conduit run with a 90 in it and it wasn't pretty. For a conduit large enough to put 4 inner ducts in, we could only get one.

I think this guy is having a pipe dream....