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Wireless Street Lamps for Traffic Monitoring
RMH101 writes "The Register has a story about a UK initiative to create a country-wide wireless data network using street lamps. It's come to pass through a government initiative to monitor all cars' speed and location, all the time, everywhere. The company involved, Last Mile, are proposing an intelligent mesh of smart street lamps embedded with storage and wireless networking to create 200MBit network access across the UK, including remote areas not reachable by conventional broadband. Work is due to start this year."
Is there anything left in the UK that isn't being monitored? Cameras on all the streets, in the stores and now wireless monitoring your speed. Bye bye 2004, hello 1984.
This is a privacy issue, not a technology issue. This would allow the police to track your car all over the country.
Trolling is a art,
Tracking vehicles is a great way to detect traffic jams. If the vehicles moving past one sensor do not reach the next sensor in a reasonable amount of time, you know you have a problem. The linked research suggests that tracking vehicles through the network enables a faster detection time for problems (faster than waiting for the traffic to clog and backup to where the sensor is located.)
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
the metal box they're going to need to protect it from damage is probably going to block any chance of a wireless signal from coming out
:) Not the easiest place to gain access too.
That's why you put the antenna on the outside...
Street lights are what, 15-20 feet tall? (5-6 meters for our European friends
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The phone boxes and transformers hanging on poles havent become targets yet and they have been readily available for quite a few decades.
Now of course those arent being used to track movements and issue speeding tickets but I wonder how many criminals will even pay attention to them after 5-10 years. How often do you notice the telephone boxes sitting out in plain site that you could hack/crack/vandalize?
True. But they do not harm people. The traffic cameras/CCD cameras that do harm people are attacked/damaged quite often.
There was a report recently that stated that something like 1 in 5 miles of road in the UK was in such a poor state that it was unfit to drive on. How about they drop this idea for the moment and fill some potholes instead?
Some councils actually spend more money setting compensation claims from car owners who have had accidents due to poor roads than they do actually maintaining them.
Anyway, with a decent network in place, perhaps we'd need to use them less anyway!
You fool! You've given cheese to a lactose intolerant volcano god! Do you know what that means?
People said that about all our speed cameras (they'd get torn down, or vandalised, etc). Most of 'em still stand though, happily snapping at the passing motorists.
Craig
"So I'm a biased pedestrian..."
So I suppose you wouldn't mind if the government planted a GPS unit in your person to make sure you only crossed the street at crosswalks?
Only 7% of accidents have anything at all to do with speeding. It's a damned near insignificant number.
The other *93%* of accidents are caused by shit driving which can't be monitored by speed cameras or wireless street lights.
The accident rate in the UK was falling steadily *until* the police and local government started installing thousands of speed cameras everywhere. It is no longer falling because now shit driving is OK as long as you don't go 5mph over the bloody limit.
I break the speed limit *every* single day but I don't drive dangerously. Speeding and dangerous driving are *not* the same thing.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.