Thursday, April 9, 2009
Infrastructure Fragility
This applies to just about all utilities, but phone, cable and any other communications utility are especially vulnerable. Just food for thought. Here's a blog entry that describes what happened in the San Francisco Bay Area early this morning: Destroy the Internet with a Hacksaw
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Los Alamos County Electric System Unreliability
The power flickers this past week have caused me so much grief, I just have to comment about them. The Los Alamos Monitor has published a short explanation of most if not all of them in the next edition after the outage. Today the Sunday edition has a longer, front page, above the fold, article about a general problem with something called the RL 115KV line. I am curious what RL stands for. The article implies that Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) has something to do with it.
I think part of the general problem is the short-sighted thinking twenty to forty years ago. Then the emphasis was on burying electric and phone lines, eventually cable TV lines, too. I don't think there was any technical reason. There used to be the opinion that lightning would cause fewer outages, and phone linepersons have told me that woodpeckers do damage to overhead phone wires. No, the reason was aesthetics, just plain opinion about what is ugly and what is not so ugly.
Now, the burying could have been done in conduits. But it was cheaper to use direct-bury cable. In some high-density areas, the phone lines are in conduits. Brittle conduits susceptible to water intrusion that may be worse than spotty moisture for direct-bury cables, but some areas do have conduits none-the-less. But using conduits for electric wires only began more recently, maybe by the year 2000, maybe even later.
So now we need expensive trenching or horizontal boring to do it over with conduit this time. And with trenching we use short lengths of conduit with joints that will probably let water leak in, so that is not good, either.
Then there is the absence of the Ojo Line Extension. Another casualty of opinion about aesthetics.
Sigh.
I think OLE should be built, including dozens, maybe hundreds, of fibers along it. I think overhead utilities where direct-buried ones exist should be considered. I think high-density, commercial areas should have utility tunnels, which would also be storm sewers, where all gas, water, electric, communication and other utility connections can be maintained and replaced without digging or boring.
I think part of the general problem is the short-sighted thinking twenty to forty years ago. Then the emphasis was on burying electric and phone lines, eventually cable TV lines, too. I don't think there was any technical reason. There used to be the opinion that lightning would cause fewer outages, and phone linepersons have told me that woodpeckers do damage to overhead phone wires. No, the reason was aesthetics, just plain opinion about what is ugly and what is not so ugly.
Now, the burying could have been done in conduits. But it was cheaper to use direct-bury cable. In some high-density areas, the phone lines are in conduits. Brittle conduits susceptible to water intrusion that may be worse than spotty moisture for direct-bury cables, but some areas do have conduits none-the-less. But using conduits for electric wires only began more recently, maybe by the year 2000, maybe even later.
So now we need expensive trenching or horizontal boring to do it over with conduit this time. And with trenching we use short lengths of conduit with joints that will probably let water leak in, so that is not good, either.
Then there is the absence of the Ojo Line Extension. Another casualty of opinion about aesthetics.
Sigh.
I think OLE should be built, including dozens, maybe hundreds, of fibers along it. I think overhead utilities where direct-buried ones exist should be considered. I think high-density, commercial areas should have utility tunnels, which would also be storm sewers, where all gas, water, electric, communication and other utility connections can be maintained and replaced without digging or boring.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Will a return to circuit switching happen?
Ah, I still have a chance to get at least one July post into this blog. I have thought about lots of topics, but skipped actually writing any comments about them, in the past six or ten weeks. I have been busy, but's that's no excuse.
I ran across an item in a college alumni magazine that mentioned something about Internet2, in support of the Large Hadron Collider world grid, or whatever that large consortium working on the data from CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research, words for the acronym come out in the French order, though, since it's in the French-speaking part of Switzerland) calls their collection of networks and computers. Turns out they're setting up temporary 10 Gigabit connections on demand, sometimes only for several minutes, for large file transfers, then shutting down that route. Sounds like circuit switching for point-to-point packet networking to me.
Maybe packet switching, or TCP/IP, just doesn't scale very well much beyond 10 Gigabit backbones?? Multiple 10 Gb connections might not work well with packet switching??
I ran across an item in a college alumni magazine that mentioned something about Internet2, in support of the Large Hadron Collider world grid, or whatever that large consortium working on the data from CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research, words for the acronym come out in the French order, though, since it's in the French-speaking part of Switzerland) calls their collection of networks and computers. Turns out they're setting up temporary 10 Gigabit connections on demand, sometimes only for several minutes, for large file transfers, then shutting down that route. Sounds like circuit switching for point-to-point packet networking to me.
Maybe packet switching, or TCP/IP, just doesn't scale very well much beyond 10 Gigabit backbones?? Multiple 10 Gb connections might not work well with packet switching??
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Town Meeting regarding Qwest QMOE
Tomorrow (Wednesday, June 18, 2008) from 2 to 4 PM, at the Los Alamos Public Schools administration school board meeting room, Dean Obermeyer has scheduled a "town meeting" for Qwest to present their product QMOE and the possibility of making it available in Los Alamos.
The e-mail that Dean sent May 21 (and Kevin Holsapple of the Los Alamos Commerce and Development Corporation forwarded minutes later) has further details.
The e-mail that Dean sent May 21 (and Kevin Holsapple of the Los Alamos Commerce and Development Corporation forwarded minutes later) has further details.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
meeting with Andrew Cohill in Santa Fe today
I should have posted this last night when I received it, because now the lead time is so short maybe nobody will see it in time, but read Richard Lowenberg's announcement of an open discussion with Andrew Cohill at the new Santa Fe Complex, 632 Agua Fria, this afternoon from 2:30 to 4:00. Also mentioned is another session they plan to have in Albuquerque Friday.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Citylink seals a deal with Albuquerque
Thanks to Richard Lowenberg on the 1st-mile list for the news that the Albuquerque City Council has approved an agreement with Citylink. And thanks to John Osmon for the clarification that the agreement grants Albuquerque city and schools access to fiber, not free internet bandwidth. And thanks to Gary Gomes for the link to a draft of the franchise agreement. Maybe I should wait for a few more shoes to drop on 1st-mile, but, no, I'm posting this now.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
May flowers
Warmer weather has had some problems staying around, but at least it has returned for another year. Winter moisture was good and we have an absence of trees due to the Cerro Grande fire eight years ago. I hope that lowers our risk of another fire. Seems to me May 4 was the day that was 93 degrees F and the National Park Service lit Cerro Grande.
The ground has been thawed for nearly two months, and working outside sometimes doesn't involve shivering. I drilled a hole under my backyard last weekend. I need to enlarge it a little soon so the 2-inch conduit I intend to put in it will fit. The hole is 16 feet long and I spent about 4 hours drilling, so I averaged 15 minutes per foot. When LA Commnet hired Albuquerque Drilling in 2005, they sometimes went 10 feet per minute. Maybe it's worth using equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars instead of scrimping on much more manual tools that total only a couple of thousand dollars. In a cramped space, though, the big stuff is just too big to fit.
Since last weekend I set up two more wireless links to test how well they work. They are supposed to be about six times as fast, and they do seem to be reliably four times as fast, as what we've been using for about 4 years.
I waited on both projects until the colder days of early April were past. I have some trips to take this summer for family events and a college reunion in September, but between those I hope to use the warm weather to expand internet capacity.
I like warm weather. Once I fill the trenches in my backyard, I would even welcome some rain.
The ground has been thawed for nearly two months, and working outside sometimes doesn't involve shivering. I drilled a hole under my backyard last weekend. I need to enlarge it a little soon so the 2-inch conduit I intend to put in it will fit. The hole is 16 feet long and I spent about 4 hours drilling, so I averaged 15 minutes per foot. When LA Commnet hired Albuquerque Drilling in 2005, they sometimes went 10 feet per minute. Maybe it's worth using equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars instead of scrimping on much more manual tools that total only a couple of thousand dollars. In a cramped space, though, the big stuff is just too big to fit.
Since last weekend I set up two more wireless links to test how well they work. They are supposed to be about six times as fast, and they do seem to be reliably four times as fast, as what we've been using for about 4 years.
I waited on both projects until the colder days of early April were past. I have some trips to take this summer for family events and a college reunion in September, but between those I hope to use the warm weather to expand internet capacity.
I like warm weather. Once I fill the trenches in my backyard, I would even welcome some rain.
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