Slashdot Mirror
Google 'Toilet ISP' Gag Not Without Precedent
1sockchuck writes "Yesterday, Google's annual April Fools' joke featured Google TiSP, a free home wireless broadband service that connected via a 'commode-based router' and runs fiber cabling through the sewer system. This is actually not without precedent. Back in the dot-com boom, delivering broadband through sewers was the focus of CityNet Telecom, which raised $375 million in funding from major VC and private equity firms in 2000 and 2001. The company used remote-controlled robots to lay fiber through sewer lines and actually created sewer-based networks in Albuquerque and Indianapolis before merging with Universal Access in 2003."
Fuck.. have fun maintaining that..
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
I thought it was not possible :) Seems like fun. Poor sysadmins :)
http://arhuaco.org/
"Why? Why was I programmed to smell feces?!"
I live in Indy and wondered why my DSL was shitty a few years ago. Now I know.
SewerCom Operator: Your call is being CO-NNE-CTED by SewerCom. Reach out and touch the sewers.
Many years ago, I met an engineer from a natural gas company that installed data fiber in its network of gas pipelines. He explained to me how they designed a modified pipeline "pig" to string the fiber optic cables.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
So given that /. loves duping things will Monday April 2 be stories recapping each fake story from April fools day?
Reporting about the gags is even more lame and will probably go on for a few days.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Google TiSP, a free home wireless broadband service that connected via a 'commode-based router' and runs fiber cabling through the sewer system.
This april fool's gag is not a truck. It's a series of tubes.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
There was also the MS iLoo gag... (just google it)
delivering broadband through sewers was the focus of CityNet Telecom, which raised $375 million in funding from major VC
Surely you meant "from major WC"...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They had a bunch of old buildings spread out over the city and their phone system was deployed as huge bundles of copper pairs in a 6" UPVC pipe. Some time in the nineties they replaced their network with a single fibre connecting each outlying building to their main datacenter. Of course the pipes were still buried under the roads and still ended in their main wire closet where the new optical equipment had been housed.
Cue some major refurbishment, and the plumbing crew enter the building and find a conveient 6" waste pipe in the basement to connect the shiny new toilets too.
The SA at the time began the descriptive email with "I'd like to start by apologizing for the sh*tty network performance..."
S.H.I.T : Super High Internet Transfer P.O.O.P : Pee(r) Over Operating Protocols
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
How long until they trademark "Crappernet".
Or does AOL already own that one?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Just so you know, I can see and acknowledge the mistake in the text above. I was just a second too slow on the submit.
Not water pipes. Too difficult.
only microsoft can turn turn shit into a real money spinner...
definitely a april fools!
...as long as I don't have to look at the logs.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I know there's a joke in there somewhere about fiber helping the poop down the chutes...
Lots of things can go wrong in the sewers, and it would be disgusting to maintain
on top of that, how would you replace the wires? go into everyone's houses and say 'ma'm, may i please use your toilet, i need to upgrade your DSL' (and then they find the stack of pr0n behind your toilet)
at least when its outside, they aren't going into your house
So why is there no spellcheck plugin for firefox?
Bill, are you losing it? Pirate The GIMP? It's free Bill. You could even put it in windows, for free.
Enjoy Every Sandwich
"dude, your ping is shitty."
Asok had to implement an Internet-via-sewers project once. "I get a straw!"
Ah come on, you're shitting me here?
"Cats like plain crisps"
I watched some Mega-Cities series of documentaries from National Geographic and there was one about Paris and it's sewer system. A large part of it was talking about how they were using it to run Fibre throughout the city. I'm pretty sure it was the same US company doing it too, robots and all. It was a fibre/wireless network.
Someone should figure out a way to send data through plumbing using sound waves ... for geek points. If not through a neighborhood, at least within a single building. Some audio transducers and creativity should do it.
I'm on septic...so is there a 802.11g suppository I need to use to get in on this? Is it ribbed for my pleasure?
As you all know first the net came on the telephone line along with the analog telephone signal. Then they implemented VoIP and the telephone calls now go over digital. So if at first the net comes over the sewers along with the analog sewage... What will happen in the future? SoIP where sewage goes over digital? I am sure I don't want a sewage modem...
I think, therefore you are.
who is sniffing my TiSP network?
sorry guys, the network is down for a bit. seems like the router took a dump.
gonna have to wipe the hd...
http://wstewart.php0h.com - the sugarbuzz project blog
Finally a situation where my SISO algorithms can come to use!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Aww, why the hate?
I laughed.
Actually, one benefit of this piping arrangement will be that if your toilet clogs, you can just pull the google wire up and down a bit, shake up the debris, and move on with your life. No snake needed!
Bathroom toilets prebuilt for Google wiring!
The London Hydraulic Power Company became an early example on internet tubes.
Google has been trying to get a free municipal wireless system up in San Francisco, in partnership with Earthlink. They have largely been blocked by a county supervisor named Tom Ammiano and a few others who are clinging to a decade-old plan to put a fiber optic network in the sewer lines. It is hard for people not from San Francisco to understand how cretinous and absurd the local politics are, but this is the issue- a faction of the local gov does not want to let the mayor look good by rolling this out. Google has made a clever play whereby when the imbeciles (there is also a significant faction of anti-radio-waves people) introduce their plan it will resemble this gag and hopefully remind people of the joke. A good article on the subject is available here: http://www.sfweekly.com/2007-03-28/news/making-rad io-waves/
"Toilers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday." V Nabokov
If you were so smart, you wouldn't be abusing cat in such a ridiculous manner.
You arise from your toilet to see a small robot, with a camera looking at you, which replies to your shocked face "Nothing to worry, routine wire check" :P
I knew the internet was a series of tubes, but this isnt quite what I had in mind.
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
Looks like Universal Access is now a company called Vanco Direct. Seeing that name was a blast from the past. My first job in the tech field was with a small ISP that had dreams of being much bigger. The guy who owned it was very good at spending his parents' money and coming up with big ideas. He fast-talked Universal Access into buying the company and giving him a job. About six months later, they fired him, and about a year later (in about 2001 or so), UA closed down our little ISP because other parts of their operation weren't profitable. This was after they IPOed. The stock hit $70 or $80 in the first few days. A few months later when they gave us ISP employees 500 shares as a bonus, it was at about $25 when they told us we were getting it, and a month or so later when we could sell it was down to about $5. I sold as soon as I possibly could. My co-workers weren't so lucky; they waited until it was under $1. It was eventually delisted.
Ah, the good old days of the dot-com bubble.
And oddly enough, those robots also found Robin Miller's career while they were down there. </localjoke>
This has to be bogus. For one thing, the sewers in a lot of midwestern cities (like, say, Indy) were built before high-rise buildings, so the buildings have these things called "holding tanks" that, well, let's just say those pipes better be able to withstand a sudden, massive increase in external pressure.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Brings an entire new meaning to laying cable.
Not really, though.
Come on, article author, would it have killed ya to say "lay cables"?
Don't forget to back-up.. oh CRAP!!
Not if you lay the fiber, and then reline the inside of the pipe.
Apparently, my sense of humour is too indirect [and sophisticated] for the /. audience.
Let me rephrase my post...
Subject: New item [on the spam menu].
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, eggs, digested spam, and spam [-- why take regular old spam when you can have spam that's already been eaten? Our digested spam is collected from the finest sewers, through a process involving wires and robots, all for your visual (and nasal) delight! May contain methane.]
OTOH, you might as well cue the obligatory "You must be new here" replies.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
I actually had the access in New Mexico...It was shitty...
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
...usenet the last 15 years...
Dude!
Your not supposed to drink the bong water.
Sheesh, damn n00b.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
... FOR ME TO POOP ON!
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
I just roxxor'd joo on my shitty ass network! Hows it feel! :D 0Wn3D!
I need to push a big load of data today. Should I call out the roto rooter man to make sure the pipes are clean?
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
Nice to see this on Slashdot. I'm the guy that purchased much of the former CityNet/Universal Access fiber assets out of bankruptcy. I own the Albuquerque ring. In the 7 years since this network has been operational it has only had 1 single failure. That happened while the ring was in bankruptcy and no body was looking after it. When you compare this to the normal way people put fiber in the ground, its night and day. The local CLEC's here in ABQ have at least 1 to 3 fiber cuts per year in the downtown central business district, where the former CityNet network lives. Fiber in the sewer is highly viable and very low cost to deploy. In fact our company is in the process starting new construction in several different cities around the western US. We own the robots and are purchasing more robot assets to help build networks. With fiber to the home/curb/business/sink growing like crazy, this technology makes it very easy, low cost and QUICK to deploy. We hold patents or exclusive licenses to patents on the technologies involved. I'd post our website, but knowing what SlashDot would do to our poor widdle bandwidth, we don't want to get killed. :)
If you want more information contact me via sewerfiber@gmail.com
So now you have just one number to call if your toilet backs up or your server doesn't.
Have gnu, will travel.
so, basically you're saying you've found some Prior Fart here?
I used to work for WilCom here in Sacramento, California.
It was part of my job to monitor the network & dispatch Field Engineer's to trouble spots.
The pay was nice, but our management needed to be nuked from orbit.
When they installed a 4' high LED sign to show in VERY big numbers the current call cue, things went downhill from there.
YES we try to get done with customers as fast as we can, but when you're dealing with an irate CEO who wants to know why his $3M a month Fiber network isn't working, YOU try telling calming him down.
Like we're not already stressed enough as it is, now you want to have a giant ticking reminder that you're going to yell at us in five... four... three... two...
I left about a month before the IRS started auditing them for everything under the sun. =/
"Not without" = "has".
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!