China's War Against Wires

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."

Really?

[gostats]

I though that was just real in the "imaginary world of cell phone commercials". (At least on TV it is!) -You won't understand this post if: 1. You've never seen the cellphone commercial I referenced. 2. Your tivo can skip all commercials so maybe you did see it but it looked like a commercial for spagetti instead.

Not that big a problem

[Amiga Lover]

Personally I've never been bothered by wires up above me. I'd rather have them up there and instantly accessible than deal with the crap of having lawn, road, path and other services dug up, just so a couple of people on the street can see the sky.

Hint. You can see the sky anyway, wires or no wires. Wasted effort aiming for underground, if you ask me. Wireless tech is a good replacement, but isn't going to work everywhere.

Tell the Afghans

[Zog The Undeniable]

A large proportion of their overhead wiring (power/telecoms) has been looted for its metal content. They're not all buying cellphones just because they like the mobility.

Establish a standard, and wait

[mcrbids]

The average income in China is rather low. That means, wire is expensive.

However, if a standard, unified, cooperative standard was released for packet-based communication was released to the public domain, and a reasonably cost-effective solution was available to anybody regardless of size, you'd see the obviation of many of these wires...

Oh... wait... that's called the Internet, isn't it?

Seriously, wires are only strung 'cause it's cheaper than the alternative. If there was a standard, effective method of effecting a point to point communication, over IP or whatever, and it was reasonably priced, all those extra wires would go away.

just pull it out!

[seanadams.com]

The reason it so bad is that they're letting practically anyone string wires. Need a line to the building across the street? Just throw it across. Nobody'll even notice one more wire! I'm sure that the vast majority of those wires are no longer in use - the article talks about attempts to identify who owns what and remove the stuff nobody can claim.

A few years ago I was doing IT work and the company had rented an office suite in a big 30yr old building. We were pulling cat5 about 40 meters between rooms, along the main hallways. There was a four inch thick layer of ancient wires held up by the cieling panels. At least a hundred times as many wires as there were people working on that floor! The telephone closet was even worse - huge masses of jumpers going back to the MPOE where there was no connection on the other end. There were 25pair cables for old multi-line systems... everything you can imagine. We just left it all there because we had no way of knowing which 0.05% of all that cable was still live.

Then last year I rented an office in a newer building. Lifted the cieling panels and found a rats nest but not too bad - I think it was about 10 years worth of junk, and it was a smaller place. There had been about five previous tenants and they'd all just installed new systems on top of the crap the previous one left. I just went up there and pulled out EVERYTHING except for one wire - for the thermostat. After that, installing the CAT5 wiring we needed was trivially easy, and since there wasn't a rats nest to dig through everwhere you went, it was easy to route everythign neatly and hang it way up high where it'd be out of the way of future installations.

Anyway regarding China: there's really no solution other than to dig in, start identifying the old wire, and pulling it out. It's not really that expensive, and it gets easier as you go!

Re:just pull it out!

[Angostura]

London Telehouse is similarly amusing. This was one of the first purpose-built Internet colo facilities; the first in London. They rented out rack space, but didn't control who put wires where. Now they, like the Chinese have a situation where they don't know which wires thet can safely yank. A riser cabinet the size of a small room will be just filled with cables of all sizes and hues that no-one has a clue about. More amusingly, there is no so much cable in the underfloor spaces that when you walk along the corridors the floor plates rock from side to side as you tread on them.

Re:Growing Pains

[Chatmag]

I remember the same thing in post war Germany. What wasn't bombed out, had wires running everywhere. That was in the mid '50's when I first went to Europe. Later, in the '60's, it wasn't as bad, so I'm assuming it took Germany about 10 years to clean up the wire tangled cities.

Gumming up the works?

[sakusha]

The wires ARE "the works."

Anyway, this isn't just China's problem. Alex Kerr's quite interesting book "Lost Japan" discusses the blight of utility poles and wiring.

Re:Not just China!

[fuzzybunny]

With Kyoto, it's not just wires--it's general shoddy urbanization. The city has no metro, so public transportation consists of fairly shabby buses, the traffic is insane, and in between historical landmarks, the place is laid out in a grid pattern filled with boxy, unattractive 1960s office buildings (at least the downtown areas.)

It's really too bad--this is pretty typical of those parts of Japan as a whole that I managed to see (caveat: mainly built-up areas between Himeji and Tokyo.) Buildings were put up and cities planned, seemingly with purely pragmatic concerns in mind, with little regard for aesthetics. Damn shame, really.

Lots of digging up roads though

[rpjs]

It's not just power that we put underground - the only overhead infrastructure you see in an average British street is BT telephone wires and then usually only the last bit from the nearest telephone pole to the home.

However, the downside is that what with utility privatisation and deregulation, we now have over 100 companies with a statutory right to dig up the roads as when they require. This means we often get cases of roads being dug up by company A, resurfaced and then a couple of days later getting dug up again by Company B. IIRC there are some roads in London that have been subject to works for more than 50% of the time in recent years.

The govt keeps legislating to make the utilities co-ordinate with each other (I remember working on the Street Works Act system for the local authority I used to work for back in the mid-90s) but it never seems to have much effect. The latest wheeze is "lane rental" - allowing utilities to dig as they want but making them pay for the economic cost of the disruption to traffic that they cause.

Mind you, I do think it looks nicer having everything underground. I find the overhead electric cables they have in the suburban US quite ugly.

I was in Shanghai last year

[HunterZero]

And my father goes over there on a fairly frequent basis for 2-3 months at a time. Always sticks me with taking care of his affairs while he's away... *grumble*

Anyways, I went all over that damned town. I spent an entire day walking around (mostly because I got lost) and I don't honestly remember there being that much of a massive wire problem overhead. I'd remember it because I'm a geek at heart and got thrown out of more than one cyber cafe for playing around to how to break their censorship software. But I'm getting off track. Sure, there were plenty of lines overhead, but no more so than any large city I've been in, reguardless of country. There's nothing wrong with running wires overhead, you just have to be certain of what you're running and not run useless wire. If it's useless I completely agree with tearing it down.

Personally, I still think that we should run fiber through the sewage systems to all locations. Everyone has to have sewage, and no one really cares if we run something through it. Why it isn't a standard I don't understand. The expense in the short term is offset by the long term gain in my opinion.

Re:Not that big a problem

[misterpies]

Actually these days (in countries with a modern infrastructure - so excluding most of the US) underground wires are run through multipurpose conduits rather than just being laid individually. You only have to dig up the road once -- to lay the conduit. After that it's a simply task simply to pull across new wires (and pull out old ones) from one manhole to the next - there are special machines for threading them through the holes.

Most of the time when the road is dug up, it's to repair services such as water, sewage and gas - not really the sort of thing you can run overhead anyway.

Easy solution

[Blackneto]

I didn't read the article but...
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.

We have this problem in our datacenters at times. Projects end or people don't need the servers anymore and don't RTS them. Time comes when theres a problem or we need to know who owns a server. When nobody fesses up we just shut it off till somebody screams.

Re:Looks like San Francisco

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps but if pipes that have little flex (high pressure gas, water, sewer) can run underground then so can electrical wires.

There are many 'shaky' areas that have underground utilities.

I think basically it costs more to bury them
than to hang them... at least the initial cost.

Re:Lots of digging up roads though

[atomico]

In many european town/city centres, to avoid constant digging and re-digging, narrow tunnels are built where power and communication cables, along with gas and water pipes, are neatly racked along the tunnel walls. It is the typical case of high upfront investment paying off over the following decades: no more digging, no more overhead cables.

Finding a Broker

[awol]

You used to be able to find a broker in Shanghai, by following the yellow cable out of the exchange building and around the streets of the town as it stopped by their offices.

Actually that's not quite true, but there was a yellow cable that left the exchange building and went to various different installations where exchange activities (including trading) took place. It was just hanging off the poles and you could easily track amongst the spaghetti at the time. That was back in '96, the last time I was there. I dread to think what it must look like now.

Yes, much of Asia is a wired mess

[Conspire]

As an expatriate living in Taiwan and China for 13 years now, I can confirm the fact that most of the big cities here are a big wired mess. Taiwan is perhaps even worse than China, because there are many cable companies and cable is strewn everywhere. I mean it is a mess, and not a very great site to the eye either.

Shanghai is much better than Taiwan, although still needs some improvement. I think the biggest problem is there is concrete everywhere, so unlike the US where they lay cable underground in the mass sprawling suburbs of the cities. It is hard to do that when you have no suburbs and the cities sprawl for a hundred kilometers, all concrete jungle!

Interesting enough, I was way deep in Mainland China near Mongolia a couple years ago, and there were huge tracks where they were laying fiber on the sides of the road. I mean this was in the middle of NOWHERE, only coal mines and steel factories I was trying to figure out why they were laying fiber optic cable there. "If only they did that in the cities", I thought to myself at the time. sheesh.

Funny,

[Kludge]

When I was in Shanghai last year I took this pic [merrill-samuelson.com] out of amusement.

new york city was the same way until 1888

[circletimessquare]

until 1888, this is exactly how new york city looked, a rat's nest of wires

then came the largest blizzard anyone ever saw, they called it the "great white hurricane" [fen.com]

no one did anything about the electric and telegraph poles in the city, even though wires were snapping, falling and killing people, as well as making the city look like a rat's nest

pictures [cuny.edu]

that is, until 1888, when the blizzard FORCED new york city to clean up it's act, and move everything underground... they had no choice! the blizzard knocked down all the poles.

still, corporations resisted [cuny.edu]

After the snow stopped and the winds calmed midday Tuesday, much of the mangled debris remained. In the week after the blizzard, the poles and the wires complicated the city's cleanup efforts. The New York Tribune reminded citizens in an editorial on March 13 that a law had been passed to bury the wires, that the companies had the money to make it happen, and that it was "high time to have done with tricks and subterfuges to avoid the plain requirements of duty and of common sense." Unsurprisingly, in the months after the storm, corporate opposition to the city's efforts to force burial of the wires remained strong: Brush Electric Company, for instance, threatened to leave the city if it was forced to bury its wires.

with the attitudes of the day, you can make the case that had the blizzard of 1888 not happened, new york city to this day might resemble a rat's nest of wires like shanghai is now

knowing human psychology: that is, don't deal with a problem until you have to, my point is that shanghai probably won't clean up it's act until a typhoon or something (do they get typhoons in shanghai?) forces the city to clean things up, just like new york city in 1888

Re:Lots of digging up roads though

[Mr. Jax]

Here in Belgium to solve the problem of roads being opened multiple times the company that wants it opened has to notify the other companies that it will do so. Then they have the opportunity to put their cables in as well. The cost of opening the road is split between the different companies that put in their cable.
A couple of years back a lot of new ISP's started putting cable and now all company buildings have wires from all the providers so they can switch to anyone they want.

Re:Lots of digging up roads though

[wrax]

I'm not sure how many people actually know about Tokyo Teleport Town [tokyo-teleport.co.jp] but that is exactly what they did with all their telecom gear, heating and power transmission cable, all underground with large tunnels to get to it if it becomes necessary.

I live in a quite forested area of Canada (as you can imagine, it being Canada and all) and I can say it sucks really bad when a tree falls over in a storm and powerlines come down with the tree. Underground power and telecommunications is definetly the way to go, although if you're only putting them in the ground then covering them with dirt I can see how that would get annoying having to dig up the street each time you want to lay more cable or have to fix something that broke.

Re:just pull it out!

[Halo-]

My father works at a major university and showed me something amazing. Back in the late 90's when tech-money was booming, the school's technology center requested a large amount of money to expand their server room. The grant was approved, and work began. All told, there were 7 layers of removable computer floor had laid down on top of each other, (one for each OSI layer?) complete with cabling over the years. It was amazingly like an archilogical dig. Anyway, simply removing the old layers of floor increased the floor to ceiling height from like 7 feet to something like 14. The money that was slated for ripping out walls went to some nice racks which now fit in the taller space, and the space recovered was larger than the proposed addition.

I think they still have a section of the old floors in a corner as an exhibit.

Re:Not that big a problem

[zeugma-amp]

I happen to own a copy of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica that was published in 1903. The article in it about telecommunications is particularly interesting in relation to the referenced article. At the time of course, telecom was pretty primative. Each individual phone had its own wire. Thus, if you look at period photos of New York City, you'll see these huge bundles of wires that pretty much obliterate the lower stories of buildings. The bundles of wires were huge and one might say they detracted much from the scenery (such that it was).

In those days, and later years, the process of connecting a call was actually a process of building a single point-to-point wire that connected the two parties, which is where the patch-boards and operators came from.

Several years ago I read a contemporary description of exactly what it was like to make a long-distance call from New York to St. Louis in the mid-20s. The caller would pick up the phone and repeatedly press the cradle that broke the circuit off and on. This would alert the operator that someone wanted to make a call, by flashing a light on her switchboard. (When the reciever was on-hook the light was off, and when it was on-hook, the light would come on.) The caller would tell the operator where to connect to - something like "Saint Louis 6 4324". The first two letters being the abbreviation for the city. Then the caller would hang up, while the operator connected to other operators across the country until the circuit was completely built, and essentially a single wire stretched between the caller and callee, and she had the callee on the line. Then she'd ring back the caller, and they'd start the conversation.

This is basically from memory which has been somewhat corrupted with age, so take it for what it's worth. The description of the wires brought it to mind so I thought I'd share...

and an operator would answer. (You see people repeatedly mashing the cradle of the phone in old movies.

Re:Establish a standard, and wait

[Reziac]

Some realworld figures on overhead wire vs buried cable in SoCal:

Overhead line: $16/foot
Buried cable: $40/foot

These numbers are from about 20 years ago, so I'm sure it's now much higher, but I doubt the cost *ratio* has changed much.

There can be other factors too. Frex, here overhead wire in rural areas is taxable by the regional authority, but buried cable is not taxable. So the local authority won't authorize new buried cable because they want to collect taxes on overhead wires. However, the state has a moratorium on new overhead wires. The upshot is that you have hell's own time and expense getting utilities permits for new development, especially for one-shot houses that don't have a big construction company greasing the wheels.

Considering what I've heard about China's bureaucracy, I'm sure their situation is equally tangled (along with their wires).