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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."
Only good things can come from a tech visionary who purchases Old World infrastructure and is willing to run fiber to them.
Governments are not necessary.
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?
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.
"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.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
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.
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
Cheap UK and US VPS
Okay, so some guy gets the bright idea to run fiber through steam pipes . . . with how many miles of *dark* fiber out there already?!? And how many big telcos with the similar idea are already bankrupt or are about to go there (JDS Uniphase, anyone?)
This sounds like some idiot who thinks he can revitalize his city by "hookin' it up to that thar new internet thang. We done gunna make it real real real fast." They did the same thing in Washington with Tacoma. They even call it "The Wired City." And you know what? It's still a crime-infested shithole with no jobs!
Wake up, fellas. This was cool at the height of the boom whem Amazon.bomb sold for $400 and the lemmings bought it. But now that reality has set in, it's just another bunch of idiots buying into the Ponzi scheme - after it has collapsed!
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:
e as e.php?HANDLE=14
http://www.citynettelecom.com/newsroom/show_rel
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.
"Steam to Heat High Speed Internet"?
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.
Anyone else read this too fast and envision a computer or router or something that ran on steam power?
For some reason, that notion made me think of an AMD Athalon system...
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.
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
1. Buy former Steam Heat Authority
2. Create a state-of-the-art fiber optic network using the steam pipes
3. ???
4. Profit!
At least the article doesn't really say more than that.
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....
"No Comm, No Bomb"
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.
Where's the RFC for "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Low-Pressure Steam?"
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
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?
Ooh, you're close to being insightful until you get to that last couple of sentences. :-) First of all, you can check and find out that Wilkes-Barre does indeed have malls and Starbucks, Best Buy and probably most of the trappings you think are important. But, to quote Richard Feynman, they are missing something essential because the [hi-tech] planes don't land. For whatever reason, nobody thinks to locate (or re-locate) facilities there. Worse than that, it apparently just does not happen that two people having lunch over a novel idea ever decide to make it happen in Wilkes-Barre and succeed. And, to be brutally honest, this hypotheical lunch would have to occur spontaneously in Wilkes-Barre for anything to happen, because it isn't going to happen anywhere else. Having a mall
or a Starbucks or a couple of minor league teams frankly doesn't mean anything for relocation, because, well, everybody has those. What many places *don't* have are a strong university or two and a city that is sufficiently cool so that people in their 20s hang around long enough to make things happen.
So, if you think about it long enough, the prototypical "missing" high tech center in the US is in fact Pittsburgh, PA. Two world-class universities, cleaned up from its steel days, interesting and attractive housing, some high cultural advantages...and people can't seem to leave the place fast enough, let alone make tech start-ups work. I don't completely accept his analysis, but Richard Florida does seem to be onto something in his analsysis of how the creative class affords economic development.
So among non-major metros, Austin and Madison and Burlington, Vermont end up being hot, Portland Maine and Gainesville have a future, and Wilkes-Barre...is like 150 places down the list and without a plausible story of how it rises up to challenge even Fort Wayne, Indiana (which isn't exactly on people's short lists, either). If Florida is right, the root cause of Wilkes-Barre's funk is neither a lack of optical fiber nor upscale shopping per se, but rather the fact that the young and the hip and the gay and the smart don't live there and won't move there.
Which brings me to my current home town: Columbia, Missouri. Yes, the major state research university campus is here, and the population is growing about as fast as they can put up houses, but at the end of the day, you're still in central MIssouri surrounded by soybeans. Is there any hope for the future? I am now cautiously optimistic. So one of the big issues of the day is whether or not we should cover the downtown with a wireless cloud. Superficially, it's the same kind of question being faced by Wilkes-Barre now, except that there it's about business infrastructure, while here it's about helping people hang out.
This Tuesday, there is a ballot question that seeks to put all small-time marijuana possession offenses into the municipal court (i.e., just pay the fine); you can argue about whether or not this is a good idea, but the question is actually being asked. Similarly, a few years ago, some movie buffs were annoyed at the fact that many indie films were making it to Columbia very late if at all, so they said "hey; we could project them ourselves" and
Babar