Years ago before I moved to Seattle, I was working in Grant County PUD as a telecom engineer. At one time, I was actually the responsible engineer for their Fiber to the Home project there. It was super interesting when we were providing 1 gigabit connections to all the houses in Grant county. We were also doing triple play at this time. Triple play is when a service provider is providing voice, data, and video. This may not be a big deal today, but this was in 2003 in Grant county Washington.
So today, I learned that Google is going to try to provide Gigabit Fiber to the Home (FTTH) network.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6193XH20100210
Interesting… but we’ve done it before already in GC. But with that said… I am sure google will do a better job. it just seems like we had some good ideas but just not at the right time.
Just like this Google power meter thing… we did that too… 
Few years back, back when I was working for Grant County PUD, we had this grandiose idea about reading power and provide a graphical view of the power with our fiber to the home. The idea was it will provide the users/rate payers a ways of seeing their power consumption and maybe assist in the more efficient use of power. The bigger benefit was for the power company to accurately predict the power requirement of the system at anytime.
So how we did this or the plan to do this was to use the meter which can provide us with a pulse and with in the fiber gateway there is a dry contact specified in the gateway specification. The gateway also have a buffer which hold the count and this can be accessible via SNMP. So the idea was pretty simple. The meter will spin and the butter in the gateways will keep count of the number of spins. There for keep track of a relative power consumption during a period. With an integration with a database and calculation, this can produce some nice graphs and estimate… so we imagined…..
Well… recently I read about Google’s power meter. I was like… “Oh my Gosh”… that was what we were working on…. Sigh… just did not have enough resources to make it happen like Google though.
But all in all… this is pretty exciting news.
Recent Comments