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China's War Against Wires
hodet writes "On sections of Beijing Road, you can barely see the sky. On Tibet Road, they dangle in garden-hose rolls and knots intricate enough to confound a Boy Scout. Over on Hefei Street, one enterprising apartment dweller even used them to hang-dry selected cuts of meat.
Tech-happy Shanghai, the most wired city in China, has a problem: wires. Telephone wires. Fiber-optic wires. Electrical wires. Wires no one can seem to identify. Black wires. Blue wires. Magenta wires. They're everywhere, and they're gumming up the works."
Those words are from Ted Anthony, not hodet.
I though that was just real in the "imaginary world of cell phone commercials". (At least on TV it is!) -You won't understand this post if: 1. You've never seen the cellphone commercial I referenced. 2. Your tivo can skip all commercials so maybe you did see it but it looked like a commercial for spagetti instead.
Personally I've never been bothered by wires up above me. I'd rather have them up there and instantly accessible than deal with the crap of having lawn, road, path and other services dug up, just so a couple of people on the street can see the sky.
Hint. You can see the sky anyway, wires or no wires. Wasted effort aiming for underground, if you ask me. Wireless tech is a good replacement, but isn't going to work everywhere.
... that stealing cable TV would be such a problem in a Communist country?
Why does this article make me want to look behind my desk? I think its the picture of clothes hanging from the wires... maybe that is where my right sock went!
I mean, compared to the mess of wireless in the US of A. Several technologies in handsets, numerous carriers, multiple standards, disparate services, lack of inter-operability etc. etc.
No wonder China is developing a home-grown wireless solution tailored to it's needs.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
A large proportion of their overhead wiring (power/telecoms) has been looted for its metal content. They're not all buying cellphones just because they like the mobility.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
With all the electric bus wires and supporting wires along with cable, telephone, electricty many San Francisco streets, especially in many outer neighborhoods, look worse than the photo in this story.
It's ok... they still dig the streets up for gas and plumbing.
The average income in China is rather low. That means, wire is expensive.
However, if a standard, unified, cooperative standard was released for packet-based communication was released to the public domain, and a reasonably cost-effective solution was available to anybody regardless of size, you'd see the obviation of many of these wires...
Oh... wait... that's called the Internet, isn't it?
Seriously, wires are only strung 'cause it's cheaper than the alternative. If there was a standard, effective method of effecting a point to point communication, over IP or whatever, and it was reasonably priced, all those extra wires would go away.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
From the article:
:-)
> Wires are just one urban challenge. Bedeviled by ballooning rat populations,
> Shanghai has turned not to poison but to rodent contraceptives.
Who gets the job of fitting all the little guys with condoms?
For people who has not been to Japan, rent "Serial Experiment Lain" to get an idea of what overhanging wires in japan looks like. luckily people are sane enough (or at lease shy enough, anyway) to not dry their meat on the lines; but one of my commuting routes passes a road that above it is nothing but juxopositions sy shards of visible sky, cut into pieces by wires going every which way.
but when you dont have the chance to burry things, i guess it's inevitable. (side note, after earthquakes japan tends to use the rebuild phase as a chance to organize some of this stuff, which is neat)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
The reason it so bad is that they're letting practically anyone string wires. Need a line to the building across the street? Just throw it across. Nobody'll even notice one more wire! I'm sure that the vast majority of those wires are no longer in use - the article talks about attempts to identify who owns what and remove the stuff nobody can claim.
A few years ago I was doing IT work and the company had rented an office suite in a big 30yr old building. We were pulling cat5 about 40 meters between rooms, along the main hallways. There was a four inch thick layer of ancient wires held up by the cieling panels. At least a hundred times as many wires as there were people working on that floor! The telephone closet was even worse - huge masses of jumpers going back to the MPOE where there was no connection on the other end. There were 25pair cables for old multi-line systems... everything you can imagine. We just left it all there because we had no way of knowing which 0.05% of all that cable was still live.
Then last year I rented an office in a newer building. Lifted the cieling panels and found a rats nest but not too bad - I think it was about 10 years worth of junk, and it was a smaller place. There had been about five previous tenants and they'd all just installed new systems on top of the crap the previous one left. I just went up there and pulled out EVERYTHING except for one wire - for the thermostat. After that, installing the CAT5 wiring we needed was trivially easy, and since there wasn't a rats nest to dig through everwhere you went, it was easy to route everythign neatly and hang it way up high where it'd be out of the way of future installations.
Anyway regarding China: there's really no solution other than to dig in, start identifying the old wire, and pulling it out. It's not really that expensive, and it gets easier as you go!
They sould see my desk behind my computer. Just last month I lost 3 good men in an expedition to unplug my monitor.
"So China is doing what China usually does when confronted with such dilemmas[...]: It's mounting a campaign, asking the masses for help"
So why didn't China post this in Askslashdot?
Huge problem in Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital. It used to be a pristine, elegant, small city. Its streets are now a tangle of cables.
This is a problem for societies such as China (now) and Japan (opst-war) which expand too quickly. In the pace of progress, it seems too difficult, too regressive, to take the time for really clever use of technologies, such as building cables underground, digging out walls and restoring the surface again, and, nowadays, wireless where possible.
If you look at well-preserved places, they still have modern conveniences like aircon, alarms, etc. But they are willing to spend more, often a lot more, to get the best of both worlds.
These are typical of any area undergoing modernization. It is kind of elitest for anyone to say that they lacked planning. (even though they are) Just look at the United States when it was undergoing its telecommunications boom in the early 1900s; (wired one not the wireless kind) countless phone, telegraph, power and who knows what else lines were strung all over the place.
o k/ R0112.shtml
This is just what happens, planners can't always be expected to accomodate for the booms of a volatile industry, the private sector is pretty resilient, it will work to help itself in the quickest most efficient (not necessarily pretty) way possible. Once the government has had time to catch up and realize the ensuing chaos, then they can work to make everything nice and orderly again without disrupting the oh so important rapid expansionary growth shown in these industries.
http://www.albionmich.com/history/histor_notebo
Big government sucks!
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
The wires ARE "the works."
Anyway, this isn't just China's problem. Alex Kerr's quite interesting book "Lost Japan" discusses the blight of utility poles and wiring.
The wires are such a mess that they would be considered a clear safety hazard by most peoples standards. I was in Shanghai (one of the most advanced cities in china) and I took some photos of both how low the wires were (as low at 4 feet off the ground!) and the over head rats nest . There was worse, I just didn't have my camera at the time.
I read the article (gasp) and then looked directly under my desk... doesnt look like I'm doing much better. So when is Power Over IP going to come out again?
Another interesting thing to ponder, last time you moved your equipment from one room to another, when you booted up did you notice that a third of the wires you once had in your old setup were unused... where do these buggers come from? its like they're breeding and no matter how hard i try to keep the female ends on the other side of the desk from the male ones it seems to happen every time.
Yet another thing to consider. I just came back from a 200 person LAN party this weekend. A buddy in my clan (read: geeks that LAN together, not CS \"noobs\"); was relieved that he brought his trusty Dell QuietKey keyboard rather than his wireless logitech. The clan sitting directly behind us all were using these devices are were having trouble with interference all the time. Probably could have fixed things with using different channels but by the looks of things (19" LCD, green Antec cases, blue LED casefans) these guys didnt know a CAT5 from a Hello Kitty Personal Vibrator
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
It's not just power that we put underground - the only overhead infrastructure you see in an average British street is BT telephone wires and then usually only the last bit from the nearest telephone pole to the home.
However, the downside is that what with utility privatisation and deregulation, we now have over 100 companies with a statutory right to dig up the roads as when they require. This means we often get cases of roads being dug up by company A, resurfaced and then a couple of days later getting dug up again by Company B. IIRC there are some roads in London that have been subject to works for more than 50% of the time in recent years.
The govt keeps legislating to make the utilities co-ordinate with each other (I remember working on the Street Works Act system for the local authority I used to work for back in the mid-90s) but it never seems to have much effect. The latest wheeze is "lane rental" - allowing utilities to dig as they want but making them pay for the economic cost of the disruption to traffic that they cause.
Mind you, I do think it looks nicer having everything underground. I find the overhead electric cables they have in the suburban US quite ugly.
And my father goes over there on a fairly frequent basis for 2-3 months at a time. Always sticks me with taking care of his affairs while he's away... *grumble*
Anyways, I went all over that damned town. I spent an entire day walking around (mostly because I got lost) and I don't honestly remember there being that much of a massive wire problem overhead. I'd remember it because I'm a geek at heart and got thrown out of more than one cyber cafe for playing around to how to break their censorship software. But I'm getting off track. Sure, there were plenty of lines overhead, but no more so than any large city I've been in, reguardless of country. There's nothing wrong with running wires overhead, you just have to be certain of what you're running and not run useless wire. If it's useless I completely agree with tearing it down.
Personally, I still think that we should run fiber through the sewage systems to all locations. Everyone has to have sewage, and no one really cares if we run something through it. Why it isn't a standard I don't understand. The expense in the short term is offset by the long term gain in my opinion.
"They told me it was impossible. I replied with maniacal laughter." http://www.mydailyrant.com/
"Over on Hefei Street, one enterprising apartment dweller even used them to hang-dry selected cuts of meat."
Seriously, if the power/fiber/phone lines are that close to a building, there must be really old standards in place. You can imagine the fun someone would have if they tapped a fiber line for spamming.
Come to think of it, if someone pulled that off, he/she would never be found because all the wires are in such a mess. It would be like looking for a needle in a field of haystacks!
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
I didn't read the article but...
Just publiclly annouce that people have 30-60 days to prove whats theirs and why it's there. Anything that isn't claimed is gone.
We have this problem in our datacenters at times. Projects end or people don't need the servers anymore and don't RTS them. Time comes when theres a problem or we need to know who owns a server. When nobody fesses up we just shut it off till somebody screams.
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
you're renting a suite on the first floor. the other five floors above you have to get their cables in through the same risers you use. rip out *a single cable* that breaks something upstairs and you're looking at a lawsuit for lost productivity and the swift application of the Cat5-of-9-tails from several BOFHs.
Even worse if you pull something like a fire alarm cable that isn't immediately noticed...
You used to be able to find a broker in Shanghai, by following the yellow cable out of the exchange building and around the streets of the town as it stopped by their offices.
Actually that's not quite true, but there was a yellow cable that left the exchange building and went to various different installations where exchange activities (including trading) took place. It was just hanging off the poles and you could easily track amongst the spaghetti at the time. That was back in '96, the last time I was there. I dread to think what it must look like now.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
As an expatriate living in Taiwan and China for 13 years now, I can confirm the fact that most of the big cities here are a big wired mess. Taiwan is perhaps even worse than China, because there are many cable companies and cable is strewn everywhere. I mean it is a mess, and not a very great site to the eye either.
Shanghai is much better than Taiwan, although still needs some improvement. I think the biggest problem is there is concrete everywhere, so unlike the US where they lay cable underground in the mass sprawling suburbs of the cities. It is hard to do that when you have no suburbs and the cities sprawl for a hundred kilometers, all concrete jungle!
Interesting enough, I was way deep in Mainland China near Mongolia a couple years ago, and there were huge tracks where they were laying fiber on the sides of the road. I mean this was in the middle of NOWHERE, only coal mines and steel factories I was trying to figure out why they were laying fiber optic cable there. "If only they did that in the cities", I thought to myself at the time. sheesh.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
If a lot of people are involved in running bandit cables, and a bunch of other people get paid to remove them, I can see why their economy is doing so well.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Telephone Fiber Electrical wires.
Crossing and shorting and starting great fires.
Sagging and snagging and causing us ires,
down to the street and around all our tires.
Intricate knots to confound a Boy Scout.
Perplexing knots that no one can get out.
So many knots that I know nothing about.
Gordian knots I say without a doubt.
On Tibet Road they dangle
each and every angle
on telephone poles
n garden-hose rolls.
Black wires Blue wires Magenta you see,
it's a rainbow put there to serve you 'n me.
On Beijing Road you can barely see the sky
Wires no one can seem to identify
growing and climbing and reaching so high
all over China's tech-happy city Shanghai.
Wires to hang-dry selected cuts of meat,
Wires as planters for growing rows of wheat.
Wires for poppy-san, wires for mommy-san.
Wires for you-san, wires for me-san.
Please do not forget some wires for Nissan!
Wires in rows for power that glows,
under my toes and under my nose.
The question I pose is where it all goes?
Where it all goes? But nobody knows!
We are betwix it how do we fix it?
How do we nix it? Let us sub-six it!
Oh what a feat I jump from my seat!
Under the street down under our feet!
That is no cheat! That would be a treat!
That would be neat that answer I greet!
Could that be beat down under concrete?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
When I was in Shanghai last year I took this pic out of amusement.
then came the largest blizzard anyone ever saw, they called it the "great white hurricane"
no one did anything about the electric and telegraph poles in the city, even though wires were snapping, falling and killing people, as well as making the city look like a rat's nest
pictures
that is, until 1888, when the blizzard FORCED new york city to clean up it's act, and move everything underground... they had no choice! the blizzard knocked down all the poles.
still, corporations resisted
with the attitudes of the day, you can make the case that had the blizzard of 1888 not happened, new york city to this day might resemble a rat's nest of wires like shanghai is now
knowing human psychology: that is, don't deal with a problem until you have to, my point is that shanghai probably won't clean up it's act until a typhoon or something (do they get typhoons in shanghai?) forces the city to clean things up, just like new york city in 1888
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Interesting story.
"with the attitudes of the day, you can make the case that had the blizzard of 1888 not happened, new york city to this day might resemble a rat's nest of wires like shanghai is now"
Right! Lucky that storm hit or New Yorkers would have missed 115 years of progress. Because of those damned corporations.probably antennas for clandestine radio stations.
I can't help but think if we just cut them all that spam would decrease by 70%
PLEASE OHH PLEASE
Are the nests of wire as bad as these?
The Jim Saga, Part 1
The Jim Saga, Part 2
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