China's War Against Wires 244
hodet writes "On sections of Beijing Road, you can barely see the sky. On Tibet Road, they dangle in garden-hose rolls and knots intricate enough to confound a Boy Scout. Over on Hefei Street, one enterprising apartment dweller even used them to hang-dry selected cuts of meat.
Tech-happy Shanghai, the most wired city in China, has a problem: wires. Telephone wires. Fiber-optic wires. Electrical wires. Wires no one can seem to identify. Black wires. Blue wires. Magenta wires. They're everywhere, and they're gumming up the works."
Actually.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not that big a problem (Score:3, Informative)
hint. radiation. I sure want as less of that as I can get.
Looks like San Francisco (Score:2, Informative)
It's ok... they still dig the streets up for gas and plumbing.
Re:Not that big a problem (Score:5, Informative)
Japan is just the same (Score:5, Informative)
but when you dont have the chance to burry things, i guess it's inevitable. (side note, after earthquakes japan tends to use the rebuild phase as a chance to organize some of this stuff, which is neat)
Not just China! (Score:5, Informative)
This is a problem for societies such as China (now) and Japan (opst-war) which expand too quickly. In the pace of progress, it seems too difficult, too regressive, to take the time for really clever use of technologies, such as building cables underground, digging out walls and restoring the surface again, and, nowadays, wireless where possible.
If you look at well-preserved places, they still have modern conveniences like aircon, alarms, etc. But they are willing to spend more, often a lot more, to get the best of both worlds.
Growing Pains (Score:5, Informative)
This is just what happens, planners can't always be expected to accomodate for the booms of a volatile industry, the private sector is pretty resilient, it will work to help itself in the quickest most efficient (not necessarily pretty) way possible. Once the government has had time to catch up and realize the ensuing chaos, then they can work to make everything nice and orderly again without disrupting the oh so important rapid expansionary growth shown in these industries.
http://www.albionmich.com/history/histor_notebo
Big government sucks!
Re:Not that big a problem - yes it is, with photos (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Establish a standard, and wait (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Growing Pains (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, but there is one very important difference in technology since then. Back then, there were no automated phone switches at all. In the very early days, lines went from point A to point B directly and were dedicated to communication only between those two points. This tends to increase the number of wires exponentially. (That is not an exaggeration -- it really is exponential.) Then they went to manual switching, which was great, but which requires all cables to be run to a single point where the person sits in front of a giant patch bay and tries to be polite all day long. Then giant, power-hungry mechanical stepper motor switches. (Each click on a dial telephone moves the stepper to a new position. Pity all the mechanical contacts have to be cleaned regularly by hand.)
These days, we have cheap, reliable digital phone switches. AND, we have multiplexing for our digital circuit-switched traffic. AND, we have fiberoptic cables that can carry hundreds of phone calls all at once. And digital technology is so cheap that you could build tiny neighborhood switches for phone lines if you wanted (thus saving cable back to the central office), or even switches for individual homes (so that only one wire must be run even if you have 10 phone lines). And anyone building things today can spec things out so that most cables carry lots of multiplexed traffic instead of being married to a multibillion dollar investment into twisted copper pairs meant for a single analog voice line.
The point being that is possible to do the same stuff with orders of magnitude fewer cables than, say, the first quarter of the 20th century. The ability to put more switches in more places and the ability to carry more traffic over a given number of cables both make the job a whole lot easier.
Re:I was in Shanghai last year (Score:3, Informative)
Hence the sophisticated delivery mechanisms [bbc.co.uk] that have been put in place.
BAD IDEA (Score:3, Informative)
Even worse if you pull something like a fire alarm cable that isn't immediately noticed...
Re:Not that big a problem (Score:2, Informative)
If it is an electrified line, then they are the power for the train. If not, then they are probably there from where the track was run on overhead power at some stage in the past.
That's the case here in Australia anyway, perhaps it's different stateside.
Re:Not that big a problem (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not that big a problem (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not that big a problem (Score:5, Informative)
At least in Rural Texas, where you see short (10 feet high) poles strung with wires, half rotted or fallen over, they were telegraph cables. The rails are still used, but the cables aren't.
Communication to/from the train is done by radio and communication between rail stations is done by regular telephone.
Re:Lots of digging up roads though (Score:5, Informative)
There are a few different kinds of underground lines.
HPFF are the most common in the US, and SCFF are the least common, mainly because they don't do well in extreme weather. The fluids are dielectric, 200 psi oil, and saturates the kraft paper insulator of the wires. The fluid is static, and removes heat from the wires by conduction. HPGF uses compressed nitrogen to accomplish basically the same thing.
HPFF requires a pressurizing source, usually a station at one end of the line, with an oil/gas resorvoir. HPGF requires a regulator and a nitrogen cylinder. The HPGF lines also require manual maintenance, as you can't just leave nitrogen gas cylinder's laying around.
Couple all of that with usual line maintenance, and you've got one expensive system, all in the name of keeping the sky unobstructed.
Re:Easy solution (Score:2, Informative)
"It's not our job"
It should be but it isn't. theres a special group thats supposed to keep track of it all but they fall short of the task many times.
NOTHING comes in without the things you mentioned. It's just what happens after its there that causes the orphans to appear. We have a DB of it all but without the participants giving up info when necessarry it's useless.
Basically what happens is a project starts. They order a bunch of shit, we set it up, sometimes load it and it sits there.
Many things can happen from there:
1. it gets used as intended.
2. Project dies and it is RTS'd
3. Project changes direction and orders more shit and the equipment is passed off on another group.
4. Project ends and they don't tell anyone.
Usually its the last 2 that give us orphaned servers. All of them are still monitored, patched and under contract. It just that after a while the reason for having it there becomes muddled because someone along the line forgets to let those responsible know when the server is not needed anymore or that responsibility has transferred to someone else.
We're talking about close to 40,000 servers of various types and uses spread across 3 centers in the country.
So it can be easy for things to get lost. Whats a $15000 server when you are a multi-billion dollar company.
Anyway, when all avenues of tracking down a server's owner fails there is an "outage" and if someone yelps we can find the info we need. If no one does it's backed up and RTS'd.
Re:Not that big a problem (Score:3, Informative)
When I read the headline I instantly thought of Shanghai -- especially parts of the old city. The area east of the Huangou isn't as bad but there are places where you really can't see the sky. The photo in the arcicle doesn't give a good sense. Above every street -- all along the street in some neighborhoods -- is what looks like a net of wires. Some places it's so thick that you could crawl across it with little fear of falling through the spaces between the wires.
I think it's a great thing that they are doing this. Not just for aesthetics but for simplicity. Part of the problem with overhead lines in a place like China is that anyone can add to the mess. Underground you need permission before you go down and lay more cable.
Re:Easy solution (Score:3, Informative)
Just publiclly annouce that people have 30-60 days to prove whats theirs and why it's there. Anything that isn't claimed is gone.
Why doesn't anybody ever read the article?
Re:Establish a standard, and wait (Score:3, Informative)
This is a TERRIBLE idea.
There is a finite amount of wireless bandwidth available in the world -- only so many frequencies at which information can be beamed from place to place. Technological advances have slowly increased the upper bounds of what is feasible, so that we can use Gigahertz bands that weren't possible with the electronics of a generation ago, but at the same time transmission power is increasing, so the same frequency cannot be "re-used" in as many local areas. The more bandwidth we allocate and utilize, the more scarce of a resource it will become.
Wired communication, on the other hand, is practically limitless. A single bundle of fiber can carry staggering amounts of information in a reasonable amount of physical space. And it's a renewable resource -- if all the existing fiber is lit, if we run out of available bandwidth, it's possible (probably not cheap or easy, but possible) to just dig a trench and lay down more cable.
The installation costs of wired communications are far higher than those of wireless. But the long-term effects of wireless on future bandwidth ought to be considered.