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Google 'Toilet ISP' Gag Not Without Precedent

Posted by Zonk on from the oh-the-halcyon-dot-com-days dept.

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."

7 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. What? by aero2600-5 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Fuck.. have fun maintaining that..

    --
    Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
    1. Re:What? by appleLaserWriter · · Score: 5, Funny

      Talk about a shitty job.

    2. Re:What? by moosesocks · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They could be using storm sewers, in which case, it wouldn't be particularly unpleasant to maintain. (Quite the opposite in fact, as the pipes would be huge and easily accessible)

      On the other hand, neither solution sounds particularly reliable.

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      -- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
    3. Re:What? by chenjeru · · Score: 5, Funny

      Pipes? Don't you mean tubes?

      --
      Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. - Will Rogers
  2. That explains a lot by barista · · Score: 5, Funny

    I live in Indy and wondered why my DSL was shitty a few years ago. Now I know.

  3. My university tried it too by grahamsz · · Score: 5, Funny

    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..."

  4. I wouldn't mind working on that net... by istartedi · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...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"?