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University Taps Sewers for Internet Access
Stony Stevenson writes "A web connection via the toilet bowl may sound like Google's most recent April Fool, but the University of Aberdeen plans to welcome students back with a high bandwidth internet network connected via the sewers.
The university tapped H2O Networks to provide a high capacity link for the next 10 years, enabling students to access the internet from their halls of residence. H2O Networks is a deploying dark fibre in the UK's waste water network to enable connectivity to those who have limited access. The network is known as 'fibre via the sewer'."
On Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs"...
Chicago has an underground network of freight tunnels (below the loop and even the subways) that have been turned basically into a bunch of paths for conduits... There are some pics of people going into the tunnels here and you can see the conduits above them as they walk around.
-nick
The point is, sewer pipes are really big and they connect literally every building in any community where there is a city sewer system. If I'm going to run fiber and I don't want to spend a whole lot of time digging up the ground to bury lines and more importantly make them easily accessible for maintenance/upgrade, then the sewer (despite its obvious drawbacks) makes a pretty good place to put them. The problem I can see with this, that unless they plane to lock down all the sewer caps and manhole covers, it would be pretty easy to hack into the lines at some point; perhaps I'm mistaken.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
If you use a sewer topological architecture you will be able to wire up all habitable dwellings quite easily, but your nodes will tend to be either at pumping stations or sewage treatment works. At any rate, somewhere down in a valley.
So the nodes will be at an increased risk of flooding.
Has anyone else got any sensible comments?
That's a nice, easy way to wire a campus wide network. The tech has been here for a while, the toughest part was designing a cleanout cover that wouldn't leak and allow for access without taking the network down to use it. They use industrial strength R/C cars to run pullstrings through the pipes.
However, the problem they can't solve is that in the US, the town water authority would be in direct competition with a private company, a big no-no. The existing players would raise hell if it were tried in a community on more than a point to point basis (and even that would get a lot of attention). I would imagine similar outrage in the UK. However, since it is a campus network they can basically do whatever they want.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Gives this shirt a whole new meaning.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I think this is fairly common in Universities that have a stand-alone campus (as opposed to one inter-mixed in a city environment).
t
My alma mater has an extensive system of steam tunnels(*) that run throughout the huge campus. These have been used for communications links for a long time. When I was there, we had an FDDI ring running to major buildings for a high speed backbone. I'm sure they've continued to upgrade the equipment on that fiber through the years. Having your own fiber offers a lot of interesting possibilities for great interconnect speed, and distributed services or data center decentralization.
(*) The MSU steam tunnels are the source of the Dungeons and Dragons tunnel games folklore, because of an incident with a disturbed child prodigy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_tunnel_inciden
i know it isn't a huge problem for larger lines, but what if one of the pipes gets clogged? ream it out and the replace the wire? sounds like a major problem to me.
i do realize that they have high pressure "jetting" systems that basically just spray the "shit" right out, but theres a few problems.
1. High pressure water could easily cut through the fibre sheath, and although lossof insulation of fibre isn't as bad as copper it still degrades the signal!
2. What if water isn't enough and they have to get out the "big guns", i.e. a snake with a sharp cutter head is about the only thing that can remove tree roots. The cutter will shred fibre just as fast as tree roots!
it's a nice idea and might save money, but something tells me that they forgot to consult the plumber!!