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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.
... 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!
Did you read the same article I did?
They are up in the sky, and they *aren't* instantly accessible. Above or below ground isn't the problem, so much as that they have intersections with 30+ pairs of wires running across them. Who do they belong to? Where do they connect? No one knows!
If no one comes to claim them, they will be cut. *That* is the heart of the article, the simplification, regulation, and control of the wires. Not whether it's above ore below ground. It's only written to seem that way.
GPL Deconstructed
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.
Most power in the UK is delivered to homes via underground cables (although the 132,000 V national grid stuff is nearly all on pylons). The problem with running local cables overhead, besides appearance, is that storms tend to bring down trees, which pull down any nearby cables. The big pylons are well out of the way of trees.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
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 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.
that's one more wire radiating electromagnetic dirt! can't we make that grounding wireless?
Free as in mason.
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.
Actually these days (in countries with a modern infrastructure - so excluding most of the US) underground wires are run through multipurpose conduits rather than just being laid individually. You only have to dig up the road once -- to lay the conduit. After that it's a simply task simply to pull across new wires (and pull out old ones) from one manhole to the next - there are special machines for threading them through the holes.
Most of the time when the road is dug up, it's to repair services such as water, sewage and gas - not really the sort of thing you can run overhead anyway.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
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 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!!!
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
Many communication lines are run along railroad right-of-ways because the railroad is mostly straight, runs between urban centers and is uninterrupted. Remember a couple of years ago when a tank car caught fire in a train tunnel and took out Internet connectivity for half the Eastern US? Sprint, one of the big US carriers, started life as part of the Southern Pacific railway. Here in Tokyo a lot of fibre got laid in the subway tunnels.
At least in Rural Texas, where you see short (10 feet high) poles strung with wires, half rotted or fallen over, they were telegraph cables. The rails are still used, but the cables aren't.
Communication to/from the train is done by radio and communication between rail stations is done by regular telephone.
I happen to own a copy of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica that was published in 1903. The article in it about telecommunications is particularly interesting in relation to the referenced article. At the time of course, telecom was pretty primative. Each individual phone had its own wire. Thus, if you look at period photos of New York City, you'll see these huge bundles of wires that pretty much obliterate the lower stories of buildings. The bundles of wires were huge and one might say they detracted much from the scenery (such that it was).
In those days, and later years, the process of connecting a call was actually a process of building a single point-to-point wire that connected the two parties, which is where the patch-boards and operators came from.
Several years ago I read a contemporary description of exactly what it was like to make a long-distance call from New York to St. Louis in the mid-20s. The caller would pick up the phone and repeatedly press the cradle that broke the circuit off and on. This would alert the operator that someone wanted to make a call, by flashing a light on her switchboard. (When the reciever was on-hook the light was off, and when it was on-hook, the light would come on.) The caller would tell the operator where to connect to - something like "Saint Louis 6 4324". The first two letters being the abbreviation for the city. Then the caller would hang up, while the operator connected to other operators across the country until the circuit was completely built, and essentially a single wire stretched between the caller and callee, and she had the callee on the line. Then she'd ring back the caller, and they'd start the conversation.
This is basically from memory which has been somewhat corrupted with age, so take it for what it's worth. The description of the wires brought it to mind so I thought I'd share...
and an operator would answer. (You see people repeatedly mashing the cradle of the phone in old movies.This is an ex-parrot!