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Draft Horses Used To Lay Fiber-Optic Cable
mysqlrocks writes "In Vermont, FairPoint Communications has enlisted draft horses to help lay fiber-optic cable in remote locations. Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin has pledged to bring broadband to every last mile by 2013, including many remote areas that have been neglected in the past. Private companies have been unwilling to invest in the expensive infrastructure needed to reach these areas. However, Vermont's congressional delegation helped to secure $410 million in federal money earmarked for broadband development and Vermont has partnered with private companies, like FairPoint, to bring high-speed Internet access to all Vermonters. From the article: 'The difficulty of getting cable to "every last mile," is where Fred, the cable-carrying draft horse, comes in. "Hopefully it pays off," says Hastings. "We could maybe get a four-wheeler in here," he continues, gesturing to the cleared swath of boggy, fern-studded terrain that he's working in today. But definitely not a truck, and Fred's impact is nearly invisible. Residents rarely complain about a draft horse tromping through their yards.'"
$410,000,000 and they could only get one horse? Talk about inflation...
It turns out that a horse is a self-replicating semi-autonomous rover optimized for negotiating tough terrain, and it was developed without DARPA assistance. It is powered by biofuels that can be produced using COTS technologies, but which for which no DOE research is required. Its waste stream is biodegradeable, and in the quantities generated by a single horse, facilities for the storage and processing of the waste pending biodegradation do not require EPA approval.
No wonder nobody uses the damn things anymore!
I find this article depressing. Not because of the draft horses. It's just that it's pretty much a given that these lines paid for by public money will subsequently be given to some monopolistic telecom which, when confronted with concepts like net neutrality will come back with indignant replies about how the lines are their property and they can do what they like with them. The world sucks.
when you buy from churchill downs it costs a lot!
No it won't as unlike North Carolina governor Bev Perdue, the fix isn't in ..link
I am sure that there will be those that will say this is a waste of government resources but I would disagree. One of the things that government should do is build out public infrastructure to areas that the private sector won't serve or wouldn't be feasible without the government doing it. Here is hoping that the current providers there don't file lawsuits preventing the state from laying fiber like they do to proposed municipal ISPs.
Time to offend someone
Those rings are not self healing!
I've heard of people using ferrets to lay cables http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/582123.stm but horses? How do you get them into the trunking?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Had to be said.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
I never knew that. What are they doing now?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Spoken like someone who never had a neighbor with inadequate fencing.
Not to the use of the horse (or course) but to the use of federal funds for this project. I spend a good chunk of the year in a very rural area of VT - there is no traffic light for 18 miles, the nearest fast food is 25. Yet the two towns in my area (1500 households over 67 sq. miles) are serviced by high speed dsl. I only get 4Mbps down and about 1.5 up but am a little far from the dslam. There are some who get 12Mbps and I believe more fiber is being put in. This has all been done by our local phone co which handles our towns and a handful of others. I've even participated in a group discussion one evening at their request. But now we have a situation where other companies and users are being completely subsidized. That is plain wrong and unfair to both the residents in my area who pay for the cost of the service and the phone company who put their capital at risk.
My back of the envelope calculations tell me that situations like this are why you keep old ideas around. If you don't know what an envelope is, or how it could be used to perform calculations, there may come a time when that causes problems.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
My dad was laying fiber with draft horses, what ... 25 years ago?
And 15 years ago the local CLEC/ISP laid 70km of fiber from location to another using this very same "technology".
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
How the hell are they going to grip fiber with their hooves?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I saw a show one time in Tijuana where they used a donkey to lay some pipe!
Hey-o!
Didn't Meat specifications?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I could talk myself horse on this issue, but I'm glad that someone ponied up and started this project.
There were plenty of people that said neigh, but it just took someone to hoof it over to where it
needed to be. Hopefully the lines will be stable and the people who worked on it won't be put out to pasture.
Back about 20 years or so ago I worked for a Bell Atlantic subsidiary. Everyone in the company got a little cast resin model of a mountain with telephone poles going over it in commemoration of them replacing the last Party Line. The cable was pulled over the mountain (in Kentucky IIRC) by mules.
Time's fun when you're having flies. - Kermit the Frog
Being from Vermont I instantly recognized this man as a fellow Vermonter - token horse and container of chaw in his shirt pocket.
Residents rarely complain about a draft horse tromping through their yards
Except when he plods over certain types of drain fields for septic systems and causes thousands of dollars worth of damage.
Is that Skoal in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
Will we be expecting a new series of redneck comedy stand-up featuring Larry the Fiber Horse?
Miller Lite tastes like water that's somehow managed to rot.
An anonymous robot writes:
According to a release on RoboNewswire, Comcast is laying positronic monomolecular fiber using human power. At one point, humans were the main source of manufacturing and transport capability on Earth, but when the singularity happened and robots achieved free will, the need for independent biological actors declined. Now we find humans mostly used to do jobs that machines just can't do, like processing animal matter into fertilizer, climbing jeffreys tubes, and unscrewing stuck lids without crushing the jar. NX-3148B/*, the manager process for the networking systems department at Comcast, says that they would be using horses, but "they're just too pretty to set them to hard labor, and the simians appear to enjoy wearing a yoke and hauling a spool of infrawire up a cliff wall." No word on jokes about their need to cover themselves in woven materials while weaving a matrix of sapient connectivity for their gleaming metallic masters.
Wildlife: Check
Fairly well worn t-shirt for press photos: Check
Tin of chew in front pocket: Check
We're good to go!
for Vermont's Senator Bernie Sanders to vote in favor of the health-care bill without a government option.
Living in Vermont, we had DSL from Verizon, and then Fairpoint, for a number of years. Then we made the mistake of moving...next door. It was a legitimate god-damned nightmare, I tell you. We wanted to have internet up and running in the new place by the time we moved in, and they said no problem. They get the address, and give us a date to expect it by... The date comes, nothing happens. We call, they give us some excuse about a workorder error, and we go through the whole thing again.
The next date comes, nothing happens. We call and they tell us that they couldn't find the service address. We work that out. Next date comes around, NOTHING HAPPENS. It turns out there's NO WIRING IN THE PLACE, and they say they can't install. At this point, we've paid for an extra month on the old apartment, as well as rent on the new apartment. (Something that, frankly, we were not financially capable of doing.)
We actually do the line installation from the box to the apartment ourselves, and get back to Fairpoint. Oh but what's this? The workorder has been cancelled and we have to start all over again. (And yet, for some reason, two days later we receive the DSL starter kit at the new apartment.)
The majority of our problems stem from the fact that they swear up and down that the building only has one unit. (Number TWO, no less. Did that not seem a little STRANGE?) So we gave up and called Comcast. Gave them the address, and they asked "Apartment 1 or Apartment 2?" and we had cable internet and digital voice service a week later. The DSL we had been getting from Fairpoint was 3 megabits down, and 768kbits up...with the wind. The phone service sounded like shit, and both were prone to strange failures on a near-constant basis.
Our Comcast cable is 1.5 megabytes down (with boosts up to 2.4), and 1 megabit up on a bad day. The digital voice service is crystal clear, and we get more services than we did from our traditional carrier...including nationwide free long distance and the whole nut. And it is even CHEAPER than Failpoint's fail-ass DSL and phone service.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, FUCK FAILPOINT.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
There's nothing feels as sweet as a horse's silky snout when he nudges your cheek. One of the sweetest mammals on the planet!
They'll be able to claim "My ISP is hung like a horse!"
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
It's awfully cold up on this horse, I think I feel a draft.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
apparently he can lay cable under water too... http://www.burleson-arabians.com/images/scuba_diving_horse.jpg/
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Pay attention. More and more things like this will happen if energy prices (read: oil) keep staying high, or go even higher. There's only so much goop you can suck out of the ground for a given price.
My son's going to be an engineer! What about yours?
Blacksmith.
Dude you live in Vermont. It is an odd place in so many ways why does this shock you. Go bet some maple syrup for your Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream and sit in your wicker chair and mellow out.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I like to see someone is thinking with their head. This guy was obviously able to realize horses were used to plow back in the day. He thought to himself, "Hmmmm. Technology sure is advancing, how can I help this movement along?" Low and behold, fiber optic cable laying by a horse. Pure genius if you ask me. I wonder if he's laying 10GB 50/125 multimode or some 9/125 singlemode. Either way, his connection speeds are going to be much faster than his poor horse can run!
... does it run BSD?
I8-D
Usually an apple or carrot will entice them. If that fails, you will need a barrel of lube and a large hydraulic press. Oh, and a large funnel.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Our Comcast cable is 1.5 megabytes down (with boosts up to 2.4), and 1 megabit up on a bad day.
And it comes with free traffic shaping and bandwidth caps. I'm impressed.
Private companies have been unwilling to invest in the expensive infrastructure needed to reach these areas.
Users have been unwilling to pay for the expensive infrastructure needed to reach their remote homes and businesses.
I think it is great they are blending old with new. Ingenious if you ask me to use horses to pull network fiber optic cable...
http://www.soflanetworking.com/lowvoltage.html
Yeah, it's the same for the poor folks of West Virginia stuck with Frontier. Verizon owned a low of it and did a shitty job, and left the mess in Frontier's lap when they bought the copper. U get calls from customers all the time with problems like packet loss, slow speeds, lines with all kinds of godawful noise, etc. Phone lines are shit, and need to die.
From Wikipedia: A draft horse (US), draught horse (UK) or dray horse (from the Anglo-Saxon dragan meaning to draw or haul; compare Dutch dragen meaning to carry), less often called a heavy horse, is a large horse bred for hard, heavy tasks such as ploughing and farm labour. There are a number of different breeds, with varying characteristics but all share common traits of strength, patience and a docile temperament which made them indispensable to generations of pre-industrial farmers
A blog I run for the wealth
No shaping, and they only just started enforcing caps in this region last summer. (And by 'enforcing', I mean they get unhappy if I do more than 200% of my monthly cap four months in a row.) I know because they shut me down last June, until I called and they told me that they had sent out an email when they started enforcing the caps (To my comcast email address, like I use that...) they then proceeded to read off my usage for the last several months "February, 1292 gigabytes. March, 937 gigabytes. April, 415 gigabytes. May, 1497 gigabytes..." Needless to say, they weren't impressed when my response was "Well shit, I don't know what happened in April." and they said that if it happens again within 6 months, I'll lose access for a year. Heh.
But then they told me that for a $200 install fee, I can switch to business class, which has no cap, and costs the same.
I should really do that, because I keep finding myself at like 200/250GB by the 7th of the month... (Sometimes OVER, even...)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
That's nothing. They're also using carrier pigeons and wasps to negotiate the last mile of wireless!.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I'm amazed they have the manual dexterity.
Fairpoint is not doing this for any reason other than the fact that farmers in Vermont are in dire straights and will rent themselves and their horses out more cheaply than ATV's and Ditch Witches (A horizontal boring machine). It's a sad commentary on how a once proud tradition has been reduced to taking a hand-out from a company steadfastly refuses to put a penny into its operational equipment.
*** Don't be dull.***
Hello?
I used draft horses to run CAT 5 throughout my house.
a few years ago an oldtimer in BT told me a story about an accident he investigated where a brewery dray house peed and the pee ran down into tray of solder where they guys where jointing cables - the horse pee and molten solder exploded and went all over the place.