[conspire] AT&T and CPUC

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ron / BCLUG (admin at bclug.ca):

> Are your cables all buried?

Ron, since all of the regulars on Conspire except Akkana, Steve, and
your good self are Californians (apologies to anyone I'm forgetting), 
the relevant question is "Was PG&E (for most of the state) or Southern
California Edison (for SoCal) willing to pay to underground the utility 
cables?"  In the very rare places where the electrical was buried and
carried through underground vaults, other utilities were, AFAIK,
permitted to lay cable through those same lines.

And, point is, that's laughably rare.  Because expensive.

There are even particularly pathetic cases like the western half of the
City of Menlo Park, just west of Chez Moen (which is in unincorporated
San Mateo County, between the two lobes of Menlo Park), where all the
utilities _were_ buried underground _but_ not in protected conduits and
vaults but rather in bare soil.  Which fact that city is rediscovering
in this decade, finding that the 1960s buildout created unmaintainable
infrastructure.  (But, y'see, the people who approved that work are 
long retired and mostly dead, so they win.)

Everyone talks about undergrounding all utilities -- especially the
long-distrance power transmission lines that cause many wildfires -- but
nobody has ever wanted to pay for that.

> Also, I thought POTS were 48v?  

Good catch.


> If Vancouver were to get flattened by an 8+ earthquake, I can't
> fathom landlines being of much use, but SMS takes minimal resources
> and can be stood up post quake faster than copper can be repaired at
> scale.

This is part of why countries industrialising in the last couple of
decades have, often, mostly skipped PSTN buildout and just deployed
cellular coverage.  More bang for the buck.

BTW:  Relevant to disaster response, OpenStreetMap is qualitatively
better in one key way, relative to commodity corporate mapping services:
The latter require that resellers (such as Google Maps, Apple Maps,
etc.) limit how much mapping data a user is allowed to cache, because
they're just _that_ paranoid about users having an independent copy of
substantive data.  OpenStreetMap does not.

So, for example, I can with trivial effort make code fetching
OpenStreetMap data mass-download complete map coverage of the San
Francisco Bay Area -- and keep it.

With the other guys' code/data, it's common to drive into a
low-bandwidth area and suddenly you are off the map, and cannot get
relevant infill until you have more signal.  With permissively-licensed
OpenStreetMap data, no such problem.

Always remember that the corporate "content provider" overlords want to
keep everyone on a short leash, but that the alternative is to say "How
about open-licensed content, instead?"