Right outside my house this morning a Telecoms guy lifted the manhole cover, reached in and pulled up a loop of rope. He cut it and went walking up the road, pulling one end.
Later I saw him doing some splicing.
I was in my dressing gown so I couldn't go and watch - and I didn't want to appear to be a curtain twitcher - but what is the process he was doing. I think at some stage a new blue cable was pulled.
I presume that whatever they do, they always want to leave a rope in the duct.
Blue is normally the polyprop rope or water pipe! BT cables are normally black, fibre duct black with yellow stripe.
One would asume so but not always. No ropes in the ducts pas here. When they want to install the fibre duct down to the village they just shoved it through, but then it was about and 1" dia and quite rigid. "Shoved it through" - until they hit a blockage or collapsed duct which happened a lot.
I would guess they blow a rope thorough when they install the empty duct. Then as required cut at whatever intermediate access point they are working on, and use it to pull though a wire. The important trick being to make sure you pull in new rope each time with the wire, so you always have some available.
In message snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org>, AnthonyL snipped-for-privacy@please.invalid writes
Back in the days when they were burying green plastic duct (late '80's?) a contractor showed me how they got the draw rope through... plastic carrier bag tied by the handles to the rope and blown through with a blast of air from the tool compressor:-)
now (for fibre to the home) they use a bundle of small green ducts from a cabinet to each house, one of the final jobs before they allowed orders to be taken ...
one bloke wanders down the street dragging a trolley with a generator and a compressor on it, stops at each house and puffs air into the "stopcock", then uses walkie-talkie to speak to other bloke sitting at cabinet and shouts the house number for him to label on the patch field.
In our case a chap came along and strung up the fibre along each pole, and stuck in a termination box fitted to the pole every so often when it looked like there were some houses about.
(It was notable that the majority of the install along the street seemed to be basically a one man job).
On the day of install, they asked where I wanted the drop wire come into the house, and strung one from the pole.
They did that in the relatively isolated hamlet/village I left not long ago. A jump from ~1Mbits/s to ~100Mbit/s. Meanwhile I'm on the outskirts of a city feeling relieved that I'd gone up from the 6Mbit/s ADSL2 (great when I first moved relatively) to 18Mbit/s FTTC which is a pittance compared to my previous property.
There was a story a years ago that when the GPO, as was, wanted to run a cable for a TV broadcast from Buckingham Palace to the corner of Green Park opposite that they tied a string to a ferrit and popped it into the duct to tow the cable under the road. I don't know if it's true.
Grandfather tied a length of string to the cats collar and popped him into the crawl space while my uncle, as a kid, tried to attract puss at the other side with a tin of sardines. Cat took a non-direct route !!.
Ferrets were used to run cables at Buckingham Palace for the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana A pet ferret named Misty ran through conduits to help the U.S. Space Command wire its New Year 2000 missile warning center at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado A group of highly trained ferrets laid cables along the tunnels under the stage in Greenwich Park for Britain?s Millennium Concert Felicia the ferret helped clean 300-foot pipes at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL
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Ferrets key to bridging the digital divide between cities and rural areas Specially trained ferrets are being used to deliver broadband to rural areas following groundbreaking techniques used by an internet provider.
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Hardly groundbreaking;
In 1906 the Wabash Valley Telephone company used ferrets to lay cables through conduits and the Minneapolis Journal stated "One ferret, it is said, will do the work of four men in the laying of cable"
In 1844, President John Tyler approved the plans of Samuel F. B. Morse to create underground telegraphs. (Morse ended up running out of time and forming above-ground telegraph wires, but underground telegraphs soon took off.) This form of communication involved laying cables through long underground pipes. Cable-laying was a time-consuming, difficult and labor intensive job - until someone thought of employing the ferret
Not terribly high throughput overall as IPoMfp[1] can only operate over short distances and has a high packet loss due to the furo quotient. The lost packets can usually be retrieved from behind the sofa.
IPoAC is still the fastest [2]
Owain
[1] Internet Protocol over Mustela putorius furo
[2]
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