Here’s hundreds we made earlier.
Paul Anthony McDermott tweetz:
Irish Rail could get into broadband provision by using the existing & disused rail network, fibre could be laid underground along lines without digging up the whole country, might be a nice little income stream for them for the old network (above left)…
Anyone?
Sponsored Link
This assumes that all of the old network is still in Irish rails hands, I know that a lot of the old network down to cahersiveen for example has been converted into farmland, I can imagine its similar in other parts of the country where the lines are closed in excess of 50 years
Alas, even some of the lines shown in the more recent map have since been closed and lifted; Waterford – New Ross and the line to Youghal for example
:-(
I’m sure they already do this – or at least allow the various networks to lay cables along the tracks.
the replies to the tweet already confirm this
it’s being done already – it’s very much the low hanging fruit of getting broadband to rural areas
Does “converted to farmland” mean sold to farmers or stolen by farmers?
Sometimes the original permission/purchase for the railway contained a sell back clause at a nominal rate to the original owners. In any case, it is often in the railway’s interest to dispose of a redundant railway route as quickly as possible, firstly to stymie any possible reopening and secondly they are liable to maintain bridges, tunnels, embankments, fencing etc… along a route as long as the land is in their possession.
Nothing like looking at a map from 1906 to see how backwards we’ve become.
Yes, because in 1906 every family had 1.8 cars!
DOB already has this done this!
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/cie-s-decision-to-give-the-green-light-to-esat-network-breached-its-own-policy-1.318928
Yep, That’s white plastic conduit on left side that runs along the Dublin – Cork mainline.
The thing to do would be not wire every home and waste vast amounts of time and money with lines to individual homes in sparsely populated areas but to wire to LTE towers which provide to 300-400 homes.
30-40mb/s is enough at the moment for the vast majority of homes. Obviously some types of business would require more.
Then you just upgrade each tower as and when needed to increase capability if experiencing more load due to expanding demand or from 4G to 5G when available which will increase bandwidth dramatically
Just an idea.
And a good one, at that.
What is the range of a LTE tower? How many would you need across the country to provide each group of 300-400 houses?
Bord Na Mona apparently has one of the best internal high speed broadband networks across the midlands.
And they also have railways :-)
http://thehelpfulengineer.com/index.php/2012/03/the-hidden-railway-irish-peat-bog-railway/
They own only very few closed lines and the majority of those they still own have fibre conduits under them already (North Kerry line for instance)
Some of the 1906 map was closed before there was even the Great Southern/Great Northern duopoly and large amounts never made it to state ownership.
the only feasible proper answer to this was (and still is) via the ESB network…in case you’ve never seen it done here’s how they lay core fibre on HT lines quickly using a very cool little robot solution called Skywrap:
https://youtu.be/Skrp2XNgZBM
https://www.aflglobal.com/Products/Fiber-Optic-Cable/Skywrap.aspx
then for the last mile the drop down to the streets and houses via crews & cherrypickers or mesh wifi/lte
What? And have cyclists tripping over the wires? Did we learn nothing about the LUAS bike hate? Terrible idea.
But think of the signal man