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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."
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?
"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...
"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.
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?
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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.
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.
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.