Tag: network

#365daysofbiking Radio activity and G force

June 20th – Another dusk departure from work gave me chance to take some pictures of networking equipment causing some bizarre consternation locally at the moment.

A handful of local residents have spent some time in the dafter enclaves of social media and decided these white boxes and antenna on lamp columns, traffic signals and street furniture in Walsall are the rollout equipment for the fifth-generation telecoms network.

For some reason conspiracy theorists are given to believe the fifth generation network will be harmful to health, is a plot to test radiation on the population and an effort to spy on us all. Oh, and it’s somehow all connected with low energy LED street lighting.

Well, these boxes and aerials are far more mundane: They are actually pretty much high speed WiFi like we have in our homes, but designed as a specific, peer to peer network for traffic signals and other on-street infrastructure that benefits from central control.

It’s called Mesh4G and you can see it here.

As signals, junctions, crossings, air monitoring and traffic cameras are updated across Walsall, more of these relay units will appear, allowing traffic folk to monitor, modify and control their equipment without having to leave the office.

Which is interesting to me as a geek, but far more mundane than conspiracies would have us believe.

And I’ll still be waiting ages at the Bull Stake junction in Darlaston…

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March 18th – I popped up to a wind-blasted Chasewater, which is still a mud-bath. I noted that the wakeboard lines are reopening for the season, and the canal valve is still open – but by no means fully; the spillway is now dry and the balancing culvert valve has been closed.

The canal filling could well be to do with works ongoing around the Midlands network right now; on recent rides I noticed a lot of drained locks and other works ready for the new season.

Either way, the level seems to have been roughly stable now for a month or so. I presume the earlier dam works have now finished.

It’ll be interesting to see how low the water gets over the coming summer.

August 4th – If you;re around Walsall and have half an hour to kill, I can recommend a walk or ride down the cycle route that follows the Ford Brook in Goscote Valley from The Butts to Pelsall.

At the moment the meadows and heaths around it are alive with colour – rose bay willow herb, ragwort, daisies and other meadow flowers form a carpet, and the metallic tang and bright pink-white show of the invasive himalayan balsam is remarkable.

This isn’t commonly thought to be a picturesque part of Walsall – but there is so much to see, including a buzzard being mobbed by crows as I cycled my way home.

November 12th – It was on my return that afternoon that I spotted a relic of times past, fitted high up on the gable wall of a house on the Walsall Road in Darlaston. It’s an Ionica antenna. You don’t see many of those about now.

Ionica were a pre-internet age telephone company that promised much, yet failed in the dot com boom. Launched in the early nineties, they offered cheap telephone line packages. What was unique was that the technology they offered was based on microwave transmission, rather than the copper wires BT used. If you signed up, engineers came out and installed one of these octagonal 3.5GHz microwave antennas, which pointed at a base station in the locality. The idea was fine, but never covered it’s costs, and as they were narrowband, would have been useless for the internet connections that were to come later. The company value was inflated to over a billion pounds in 1997, but collapsed in 1998. The network was wound down by BT, and only a few remnants like this antenna survive.

Like the Rabbit zone phone, a curious idea in a time of great change.