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Google 'Toilet ISP' Gag Not Without Precedent 110

Posted by Zonk 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."
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Google 'Toilet ISP' Gag Not Without Precedent More

Google 'Toilet ISP' Gag Not Without Precedent

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  • What? (Score:5, Funny)

    by aero2600-5 ( 797736 ) on Sunday April 01, 2007 @11:30PM (#18570499)
    Fuck.. have fun maintaining that..

    • Obligatory (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There was also the MS iLoo gag... (just google it)

    • Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)

      by appleLaserWriter ( 91994 ) on Sunday April 01, 2007 @11:46PM (#18570565)
      Talk about a shitty job.

    • Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Sunday April 01, 2007 @11:53PM (#18570601) Homepage
      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        On the other hand, neither solution sounds particularly reliable.

        No need to worry with the backhoe, just call Roto-Router. Roto-Router is the name, we wash your troubles down the drain.

      • Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)

        by arivanov ( 12034 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @01:08AM (#18570831) Homepage
        The investigation into these technologies happened mostly because many city councils got pissed off by the non-stop digging to lay fiber during dot-bomb and started threatening to introduce limits on how many times you can dig up a road as well as license fees on digging. The number discussed in the UK were once per 5 years and something in the tens of thousands of pounds per linear meter of dig licensing fee if you have to re-dig before this expires.

        The dot bomb ended and the surviving telecom operators successfully fought it off. The licensing regime as not introduced.

        Otherwise, fiber through sewerage is a viable tech. The only reason it is not being done more often is that most of the water utilities who control the sewers live in the 17th century (or would like to) and it is nearly impossible to negotiate a sensible access deal with them.

        • Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @03:29AM (#18571239) Homepage
          Fibre through storm water or sewer is a fantasy, have you seen the device they use to clear storm water and sewer blockages. That spinning bit on the end of drain rooters would have an interesting time with any cable in the pipe. As for large bore pipes where people can walk though them, they are so infrequent that it is pointless and the typical repair solution of relining the inside of those pipes would interfere with any cable fixed to the walls of the pipe.

          The same hurdle remains as always, holding your breath while your capital flows out until you have sufficient network in the ground to start generating income, while the incumbent copper telcos drastically drop their prices in order to starve you out and try to pick up your fibre optic network on the cheap at the bankruptcy auction.

          It really has to be done on an international scale, where you generate sufficient capital to target a less populous western countries (fewer connections and easier access), gain a dominant position in that market with your fibre optic network and with that revenue, and some additional capital, expand into other more complex markets (with the gained technical expertise and experience).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by arivanov ( 12034 )
            As for large bore pipes where people can walk though them, they are so infrequent that it is pointless

            Depends where. In the US - maybe yes. In Europe (where digging in downtown is really a problem) - definitely not.

            For example, the main sewerage network under central London was built during victorian times and the tunnels are wider than the tunnels for the tube. It covers all central London. Similarly, you can drive a submarine through parts of the sewerage network in Paris or Rome. They were built for

        • Nice to see this on Slashdot. I'm the guy that purchased much of the former CityNet/Universal Access fiber assets out of bankruptcy. I own the Albuquerque ring. In the 7 years since this network has been operational it has only had 1 single failure. That happened while the ring was in bankruptcy and no body was looking after it. When you compare this to the normal way people put fiber in the ground, its night and day. The local CLEC's here in ABQ have at least 1 to 3 fiber cuts per year in the downtow

      • Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)

        by chenjeru ( 916013 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @02:23AM (#18571049)
        Pipes? Don't you mean tubes?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MichaelSmith ( 789609 )

        They could be using storm sewers, in which case, it wouldn't be particularly unpleasant to maintain

        Once I got called out during heavy rain because a system went down due to flooding under the false floor. The building had been flooded through the phone cable pipe. The tech who came out from the phone company told me with a straight face that their network is virtually an additional storm water system.

        We opened a pit down hill from my building, tugged on a cable and cleared the blockage which had caused th

    • Brings an entire new meaning to laying cable.

      Not really, though.
  • I thought it was not possible :) Seems like fun. Poor sysadmins :)

  • That explains a lot (Score:5, Funny)

    by barista ( 587936 ) on Sunday April 01, 2007 @11:35PM (#18570519) Homepage
    I live in Indy and wondered why my DSL was shitty a few years ago. Now I know.

  • Oblig. Futurama: Voice over TiSP (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    SewerCom Operator: Your call is being CO-NNE-CTED by SewerCom. Reach out and touch the sewers.

  • Other pipelines, too (Score:3, Interesting)

    by UnderCoverPenguin ( 1001627 ) on Sunday April 01, 2007 @11:39PM (#18570535)
    Many years ago, I met an engineer from a natural gas company that installed data fiber in its network of gas pipelines. He explained to me how they designed a modified pipeline "pig" to string the fiber optic cables.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If I recall right, there was a firm in Texas that was going to run fiber optic cables through gas lines and made deals with the pipeline owners. In court action however, that company was stopped from doing so as the court decided that easements for right of way the pipeline companies had were only for pipelines and not for fiber optic cables. Wish I had the details on this but I seem to be too tired to chose the right search words. I do remember that something about the suit made me suspicious as to why the

    • Re:Other pipelines, too (Score:4, Interesting)

      by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @02:10AM (#18571015) Homepage
      Really? I'd think that would reduce capacity, and make maintenance unbearably difficult. It would likely prevent any future 'pigs' from traveling through the pipe, and require a portion of the line to be shut down and evacuated before any maintenance could be performed.

      Of course, I could be completely wrong.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ozeki ( 466460 )
      Actually Williams Communications used decommissioned oil and gas lines. Back in the late 90's they had about 33,000 miles of fiber strung through the US. http://www.williams.com/about/history.asp [williams.com] They used a PIG, which is used to inspect and clean the line, and attached multiple strands of fiber and sent it on its way. This network is the basis for a large part of the fiber network in the US.
      • I used to work for WilCom here in Sacramento, California.
        It was part of my job to monitor the network & dispatch Field Engineer's to trouble spots.
        The pay was nice, but our management needed to be nuked from orbit.
        When they installed a 4' high LED sign to show in VERY big numbers the current call cue, things went downhill from there.
        YES we try to get done with customers as fast as we can, but when you're dealing with an irate CEO who wants to know why his $3M a month Fiber network isn't working, YOU try
  • The first April 1 gag in the day might be funny. After a few gags contributed by each butt-wad, they start to get very lame.

    Reporting about the gags is even more lame and will probably go on for a few days.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by inasra ( 1079579 )
      I don't know what you are complaining about. For once i saw no dupes on slashdot and the icing on the cake was that the grammar and spelling was above average. Whats up with that? I mean Slashdot must be going down the tubes.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by leuk_he ( 194174 )
      SPecially since this is more or less a very old story that is reported on.

  • ted stevens said it best (Score:5, Funny)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Sunday April 01, 2007 @11:42PM (#18570547) Homepage
    Google TiSP, a free home wireless broadband service that connected via a 'commode-based router' and runs fiber cabling through the sewer system.

    This april fool's gag is not a truck. It's a series of tubes.
    • Google TiSP, a free home wireless broadband service that connected via a 'commode-based router' and runs fiber cabling through the sewer system.

      This april fool's gag is not a truck. It's a series of tubes.

      Eeewwww...

  • Typo (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday April 01, 2007 @11:45PM (#18570559)
    delivering broadband through sewers was the focus of CityNet Telecom, which raised $375 million in funding from major VC

    Surely you meant "from major WC"...

  • My university tried it too (Score:5, Funny)

    by grahamsz ( 150076 ) on Sunday April 01, 2007 @11:45PM (#18570561) Homepage Journal
    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..."

  • So (Score:4, Funny)

    by Trogre ( 513942 ) on Sunday April 01, 2007 @11:46PM (#18570569) Homepage
    How long until they trademark "Crappernet".

    Or does AOL already own that one?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by RMB2 ( 936187 )
      HA!

      ...AOL...
      Just reading that in a post made me laugh. I really did spend several seconds thinking "Are they even still around, or did they CompuServe out already?". Since I don't have a TV, and they never bother sending those shitty frisbee-tin-CDs to university students, I actually don't even know the answer.
      • AOL seems to have become a relic of the past. You see the rare person using it, but not very often. I remember when they used to put "AOL keywords" on movie trailers. I haven't seen very many movies or trailers lately, but I don't think they do that any more.

        The last person I saw using AOL was an older lady running that as her internet service, on a computer that could barely run win95. It's a miracle that her system was still running in 2005 (when I saw it last).

  • redmond are the winners (Score:3, Funny)

    by nighty5 ( 615965 ) on Sunday April 01, 2007 @11:50PM (#18570587)
    only microsoft can turn turn shit into a real money spinner...

    definitely a april fools!

  • I wouldn't mind working on that net... (Score:5, Funny)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Sunday April 01, 2007 @11:58PM (#18570609) Journal

    ...as long as I don't have to look at the logs.

  • "dude, your ping is shitty."

  • Dilbert (Score:1)

    by bsa3 ( 200 )
    Asok had to implement an Internet-via-sewers project once. "I get a straw!"
    • Asok had to implement an Internet-via-sewers project once. "I get a straw!"

      I believe it started out as Wally's project, who passed it off "as a favor" to Asok.

  • Ah come on, you're shitting me here?

  • I watched some Mega-Cities series of documentaries from National Geographic and there was one about Paris and it's sewer system. A large part of it was talking about how they were using it to run Fibre throughout the city. I'm pretty sure it was the same US company doing it too, robots and all. It was a fibre/wireless network.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Askmum ( 1038780 )
      Yes, they were. I've seen the same documentary and numerous reports can be found on the internet supporting this.

    • Re:Wasn't Paris (city) doing this too? (Score:4, Informative)

      by phayes ( 202222 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @03:18AM (#18571201) Homepage
      Iliad, the parent company of Free.fr announced here [iliad.fr]that they will be spending a billion Euros to deploy fiber to the home throughout Paris during 2007 & 2008. This network will be deployed using Paris' sewers. As most of Paris is 5-6 stories tall, the sewer access for each building is appropriately large. The sewers themselves serve as storm drains and are usually accessible to sanitation workers. There are around a thousand sanitation workers who are down there anyway to maintain this vital service, so, scatological jokes aside, using the sewers to distribute networks this way is the cheapest & smartest means of deployment in a city like Paris.

      I can't wait to get my 50Mbit upload & download, unlimited telephone to the USA & other countries & multiple TV decoders for 30 a month...
  • Finally a situation where my SISO algorithms can come to use!
  • Actually, one benefit of this piping arrangement will be that if your toilet clogs, you can just pull the google wire up and down a bit, shake up the debris, and move on with your life. No snake needed!

    Bathroom toilets [wasauna.com] prebuilt for Google wiring!
  • The London Hydraulic Power Company [wikipedia.org] became an early example on internet tubes.
  • Google has been trying to get a free municipal wireless system up in San Francisco, in partnership with Earthlink. They have largely been blocked by a county supervisor named Tom Ammiano and a few others who are clinging to a decade-old plan to put a fiber optic network in the sewer lines. It is hard for people not from San Francisco to understand how cretinous and absurd the local politics are, but this is the issue- a faction of the local gov does not want to let the mayor look good by rolling this out.

  • Tubes (Score:3, Funny)

    by Quzak ( 1047922 ) on Monday April 02, 2007 @06:22AM (#18571697)
    I knew the internet was a series of tubes, but this isnt quite what I had in mind.
  • Looks like Universal Access is now a company called Vanco Direct. Seeing that name was a blast from the past. My first job in the tech field was with a small ISP that had dreams of being much bigger. The guy who owned it was very good at spending his parents' money and coming up with big ideas. He fast-talked Universal Access into buying the company and giving him a job. About six months later, they fired him, and about a year later (in about 2001 or so), UA closed down our little ISP because other parts of

  • Huh (Score:2)

    by tbone1 ( 309237 )
    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.

    And oddly enough, those robots also found Robin Miller's career while they were down there. </localjoke>

    This has to be bogus. For one thing, the sewers in a lot of midwestern cities (like, say, Indy) were built before high-rise buildings, so the buildings have these things called "holding tanks" that, wel

  • "The company used remote-controlled robots to lay fiber through sewer lines"


    Come on, article author, would it have killed ya to say "lay cables"?
  • ...usenet the last 15 years...
  • I need to push a big load of data today. Should I call out the roto rooter man to make sure the pipes are clean?
  • So now you have just one number to call if your toilet backs up or your server doesn't.
  • "Not without" = "has".

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