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Rewiring (and Unwiring) New Orleans
stinkymountain writes "Is New Orleans bouncing back from Hurricane Katrina with the most advanced telecom system in the country? According to Network World, carriers have invested billions to rebuild the wired and wireless networks in the city, and businesses are taking advantage of new, advanced telecom services."
This story selected and edited by LinuxWorld editor for the day Saied Pinto.
Does that mean we have to wait for a hurricane in order to get high speed in my area?
It's nice that they are re-building and as with that they indeed have to use new technologies because implementing old would be more expensive. It's logical to me that this happens. It's like building a new house, you can't get the cotton-covered electrical wiring so you get new better wiring. How this will translate to costs of course is another issue. Re-wiring existing technology IS also expensive and the costs/benefit is not as high.
But will this also mean that the poor in New Orleans won't be able to pay the charge for fiber-to-premises? Or will they make it so cheap so that New Orleans becomes the haven for geeks and technological companies?
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Let's hope the Telco's equipment also works underwater - or is at least water-proof.
Because one thing is sure: New Orleans is going so sink into the ocean rather sooner than later. Just the people (left) living there haven't caught up to the reality, it seems.
But the term "sinking billions in infrastructure" suddenly makes more sense, right?
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Hmm -- sounds like the urban equivalent of a forest fire in some ways -- the fire comes through and clears out all the old stuff and clears the way for new growth. It'd be very very cool to see New Orleans come back as a much less corrupt and much more modern city that business flocks to, thereby improving the job situation for all residents and improving the tax base allowing for restoration of the historic parts of the city, etc... of course, that's unlikely to happen as the powers that be seem to have survived the flood.
The Army Corps of Engineers created the god damned mess by dredging the river and laying in a new, straight canal for oil tankers and such to get at your precious oil so you could gas your precious car that you drive on freeways made by taxpayers paying hundreds of billions of dollars so that your white bread town could exist in suburban splendor at nearly no cost to you. The storm surge went straight up the canal and swamped the stormwalls. for your oil.
And taxpayers gave lovely tax breaks for the oil companies who tore out the wetlands surrounding the city which soaked up the ocean's force for thousands of years, and which are disappearing at a rate of two football fields A DAY, leaving the city naked and armorless. For your oil, at their expense.
Adjusted for inflation, we've spent trillions of dollars since the 50's laying concrete ribbons into the cornfields so smarmy, self-satisfied EXTREMELY subsidized white a-holes could sneer at the cities which funded their existence. Now we've nothing BUT suburbs and the cities are being colonized by the white suburbanites, and we've shut down the factories in the cities which used to make things to sell to other people for trade cash to build lovely 1.5 million dollar soft lofts... and I'm sure the white a-holes who live in such will be just fine as the realization sinks in to those who don't have the money to live anywhere, city or suburb, that there is no place left to work and no money from the tax-cut jackasses who wrecked everything to rebuild the economy. Castles and serfs, baby. Their own fault for choosing where they live. After all, you did...
Not that you could have gotten through the switch anyway. I lived in New Orleans when the hurricane hit. My 504 area code cell phone was virtually unusable for incoming calls for the better part of the next couple of months. Backup generator or not, the lines were simply unusable. Actually, when we were evacuating, myself and my friend in the other car, once we finally made a connection on our cell phones, just stayed on the line with each other for several hours so we could communicate driving (idling) strategies.
That said, I haven't read the friendly article yet so I don't know if they mention the exact details, but from what I learned from a friend of mine in the T-Com industry in New Orleans, most of the major carriers either didn't correctly place their generators or simply didn't have enough diesel. Suffice it to say, my primary means of communication on the road became texting from my phone since those didn't require voice services, and sending email from my Skytel pager. I had to purchase a prepaid phone once in Houston in order to receive any calls at all from family and work.
On a different note, the city wide wireless network is very cool. I took advantage of it the last time I was down there. It's certainly useful to be able fire up my laptop from anywhere in the downtown area and connect to "City of New Orleans" to check my email. If all major cities started doing this, it could open up the markets to a whole new subset of wifi enabled mobile devices, like the Skype phones and Nokia wifi web tablet, not to mention embeded devices in automobiles such as, perhaps, a Google Maps/GPS navigator. The only criticism that I had was that I, not surprisingly, had a hard time maintaining a connection from the 18th floor of my hotel. I've also heard that the coverage isn't as good outside of the CBD, but I didn't take my laptop with me to test when I ventured out to the 'burbs.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Things are getting better each day here in New Orleans.
One problem that is still present is phone service. A lot of people I know are primarily using cellular phones as their main numbers since the landlines are not reliable / available in some areas. To BellSouth's credit, they have taken this opportunity to replace the copper wires throughout the city with fiber optics, which will provide more bandwidth. But this will take some time to do (and it does not take an inordinate amount of extra time than replacing the lines with new copper wires).
A lot of people in the city are now talking about scanning their important pictures into the computer and sending them off to relatives out of town (by CD or email).
Some of the lessons learned from Katrina in New Orleans include:
It is hoped that the lessons learned here help prepare other people in other places for the next emergency.
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What I don't understand is how you can be such a huge, rich country, claim to be the greatest country on Earth, and yet you can't do what the Dutch have done with a quarter of their country to one city on your coast? Heck, even the Italians managed to do it for over a millenia - Venice was founded some time between 400 and 800 AD.
Why can't America do it right in one city?
- Mike
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I just can't fathom why people are investing IT infrastructures in a sinking city, extremely susceptible to flooding because it's below sea level. Eletronics under several feet of water don't perfrom very well.
I can't fathom why someone would invest in any technology in Silicon Valley or San Francisco, where at any moment with no notice, a huge earthquake would destroy the place. Electronics under several tons of debris don't perform very well.
Every place on the planet has inherent risks. As an ISP in New Orleans, we were affected by the hurricane, but ONLY because the transfer switch malfunctioned. Our servers never lost power the entire time. The truth is, errors by people causesmore problems than "acts of god."
The destruction in New Orleans was caused by the Army Corps of Engineers, not Hurricane Katrina. Most ISPs and other shops were still online after the hurricane passed. It was the failure of substandard levees that was the responsibility of the Federal Government that did the city in. Improper building of any structure, in any location on the planet can cause similar results, above or below sea level.