Re: Cable-Tying with Waxed Twine
Confession time - I'm over 50 At 09:41 p.m. 24/01/2007 -0700, you wrote: As for plastic ties (TyRap is the brand name for the Thomas Betts version) they may be easy to use, but they do have several functional drawbacks, including: 1) difficulty in maintaining consistent tension from tie to tie, and as a correlary it is comparatively easy to overtighten one, risking compression-related damage to the underlying cabling, or as mentioned above, increasing crosstalk when using twisted-pair cables You can buy a cable-tie gun from Panduit, along with ties on a bandolier. They are used in appliance manufacture for making up wiring looms, instead of lacing them. The tension is programmable .You may also remember that in cars, the wiring harness was in a cloth jacket.. 2) can harden and/or become brittle over time, eventually failing under stress H'mm - you buy various grades of cable-tie. I have a lot of personal experience with a black Ty-Rap. Its black with a stainless-steel tag. The black makes it UV-stable and I get nervous if we don't have a few thousand in stock. I carry a few hundred in my van... White ties aren't UV stable and so are indoor rated only. Of course I live in a country where the weather report gives a UV rating each day, due to the Ozone depletion making a hole right above us - due to CFCs in aerosol can's. Thanks guysand girls. Get Joe Abley to tell you about CityLink over a few beers. But basically, its a 20Km metro fiber network suspended off the trolley bus wires. I built the fist 200 odd buildings, before we got staff. The fiber is attached to a synthetic rope (kevlar) which is the catenary wire, by a TyRap ty25 (from memory), every 300 mm. The way we work was my van pulled the trailer with the fiber drum, Ryan and Glenn were in the cherry-picker, moving from pole to pole. I was on the ground cable tying like mad. Ryan then pulled the cable up, tensioned it, made it fast,and we moved on. Been doing it since 1996. These days we use self supporting fiber, so run much faster, no cable ties until we overlay 3) typical background vibration causes them to tend to chafe the sheaths of the wiring that the ties are in direct contact with, over a period of years. buy the ones with stainless tags - they last for years. The cheap plastic ones are toys Lacing is a lot slower than using platic ties, and doing it is rough on your fingers. If you're lucky you know a data tech who can show you how to do it properly, it's really not something that you can just describe in writing. Depending upon the specific need, contact points may also have pieces of fish paper laced to them before the wiring is laid out and laced into place. Not unusual to see this when DC power cables are being secured. H'mmm - the DC cables I'm used to are the size of your arm - per polarity.we don't lace them, just bury them. But sorry - I'm old and been around. I worked in a power utility for 14 years. BTW Broadband over Power - we call ripple control. It turns on the street lights, load control etc. Been doing it for years and its not hard to go both ways. Zellweger in Uster Switzerland used to make the cool stuff. I have photos somewhere. We also inject DC into the AC network, but thats another beer or two. First you have to work out why the utilities use AC.. Rich
Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?
At 09:50 a.m. 15/01/2007 -0500, Gian Constantine wrote: The problem with this all (or mostly) VoD model is the entrenched culture. In countries outside of the U.S. with smaller channel lineups, an all VoD model might be easier to migrate to over time. In the U.S., where we have 200+ channel lineups, consumers have become accustomed to the massive variety and instant gratification of a linear lineup. If you leave it to the customer to choose their programs, and then wait for them to arrive and be viewed, the instant gratification aspect is lost. This is important to consumers here. While I do not think an all or mostly VoD model will work for consumers in U.S. in the near term (next 5 years), it may work in the long term (7-10 years). There are so many obstacles in the way from a business side of things, though. I don't see many obstacles for content and neither do other broadcasters. The broadcast world is changing. Late last year ABC or NBC (sorry brain fade) announced the lay off of 700 News staff, saying news is no longer king. Instead they are moving to a strategy similar to that of the BBC. ie lots of on-demand content on the Internet. Rich
Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?
At 08:40 p.m. 9/01/2007 -0500, Gian Constantine wrote: It would not be any easier. The negotiations are very complex. The issue is not one of infrastructure capex. It is one of jockeying between content providers (big media conglomerates) and the video service providers (cable companies). We're seeing a degree of co-operation in this area. Its being driven by the market. - see below. snip On Jan 9, 2007, at 7:57 PM, Bora Akyol wrote: An additional point to consider is that it takes a lot of effort and to get a channel allocated to your content in a cable network. This is much easier when TV is being distributed over the Internet. The other bigger driver, is that for most broadcasters (both TV and Radio), advertising revenues are flat, *except* in the on-line area. So they are chasing on-line growth like crazy. Typically on-line revenues now make up around 25% of income. So broadcasters are reacting and developing quite large systems for delivering content both new and old. We're seeing these as a mixture of live streams, on-demand streams, on-demand downloads and torrents. Basically, anything that works and is reliable and can be scaled. (we already do geographic distribution and anycast routing). And the broadcasters won't pay flash transit charges. They are doing this stuff from within existing budgets. They will put servers in different countries if it makes financial sense. We have servers in the USA, and their biggest load is non-peering NZ based ISPs. And broadcasters aren't the only source of large content. My estimate is that they are only 25% of the source. Somewhere last year I heard John Chambers say that many corporates are seeing 500% growth in LAN traffic - fueled by video. We do outside webcasting - to give you an idea of traffic, when we get a fiber connex, we allow for 6GBytes per day between an encoder and the server network - per programme. We often produce several different programmes from a site in different languages etc. Each one is 6GB. If we don't have fiber, it scales down to about 2GB per programme. (on fiber we crank out a full 2Mbps Standard Def stream, on satellite we only get 2Mbps per link). I have a chart by my phone that gives the minute/hour/day/month traffic impact of a whole range of streams and refer to it every day. Oh - we can do 1080i on demand and can and do produce content in that format. They're 8Mbps streams. Not many viewers tho :-) We're close to being able to webcast it live. We currently handle 50+ radio stations and 12 TV stations, handling around 1.5 to 2million players a month, in a country with a population of 4million. But then my stats could be lying.. Rich (long time lurker)
Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?
At 08:58 a.m. 10/01/2007 -0500, Gian Constantine wrote: All H.264? no - H.264 is only the free stuff. Pretty well its all WindowsMedia - because of the DRM capabilities. The rights holders are insisting on that. No DRM = no content. (from the big content houses) The advantage of WM DRM is that smaller players can add DRM to their content quite easily and these folks want to be able to control that space. Even when they are part of an International conglomerate, each country subsidiary seems to get non-DRM'ed material and repackage it (ie add DRM). I understand this is how folks like Sony dish out the rights - on a country basis, so each subsidiary gets to define the business rights (ie play rights) in their own country space. WM DRM has all of this well defined. Rich
