Yep, and I could give an all-day presentation on the topic, including the UK and Australia as well as the USA.

The Bell System operated according to engineering standards that called for design and installation details that were too expensive to provide in rural areas without raising the price of service to an unacceptable level. So the Bell stayed out of those areas at first, and smaller independent telcos sprang up to serve them.

Farmers in some rural areas not served by Bell, set up "telephone cooperatives" where they all bought in and paid for the equipment, and chipped in labor or hired someone to go about setting up the systems. The earliest implementations ran their wires along the tops of the fences between farm properties.

Another story that's fairly well known: how the dial phone was invented.

Undertaker Almon Strowger noticed that he was losing business to a competitor who had a relative working as an operator. When someone said "operator, get me an undertaker," she'd put them through to her relative. Strowger decided he'd had enough of that, and set about inventing the Automatic Telephone. In a way, you could consider Strowger to also be the inventor of the concept of "net neutrality."

This was the origin of the Strowger or (in Bell System lingo) "Step-by-Step" switching system. These machines are a beauty to behold as they go through their clever mechanical motions to connect calls. I spent my teenage years in an area served by a Strowger switch, and I had the chance to work on Strowger PBXs a couple of times, as well as building some nifty stuff from Strowger components. Most noticeable is the definite sense of being in a distinct "place" in cyberspace, a unique route through the machine, with subtle acoustical characteristics that a trained tech (or a teenage phone phreak) could recognize.

Strowger switches served in the USA from about 1896 (the very first one) to the late 1980s, and in the UK and Australia from the late 1920s or so through the late 1980s. They were immune to the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) created by atomic bombs. And overnight when traffic was light, they used less power than today's digital switches.

There are oodles of stories to be told about Strowger.

For one thing, "wiretaps" required physical connections to the lines at the exchange. In the days when the GPO (General Post Office) ran the telephones in the UK, GPO engineers were tasked with showing military intelligence and law enforcement where to find the correct places to make the connections. But if they (the GPO engs.) decided that a particular wiretap was political or otherwise an abuse of authority, they would wait until the coast was clear and then just disconnect it.

Today, with CALEA and Google Voice, we have no control over who gets into the telephone switches via the back door, or who intercepts calls from elsewhere in the network, and no way to stop them. Some would call that "progress."

Going back to WW2, resistance members in the telephone engineering staffs in Nazi-occupied countries figured out a clever way to "route around the damage" of Nazi eavesdropping. I'll save that story for some possible future presentation.

I also have a working English uniselector dial system that uses Strowger components, that I could bring in and demonstrate at some point if anyone's interested.

-G.

=====

On 13-03-26-Tue 10:24 PM, Romy Ilano wrote:

side note:
did you know the history of telephone companies in the usa? i was reading about it. (someone smart left a book for me to read) =D

it's so fascinating. before the depression, it wasn't profitable for major telecoms to go to rural communities, especially in the midwest. they disrespected the farmers and thought they were yokels...

so the midwest used to be pretty left wing too (and the source of a lot of unrest with the farmers etc), so there was this big tradition of DIY telephone and telegraphs. someone gave me this history to read, it was so neat! it's weird that nobody talks about this history now. it's like it was forgotten!

it's so weird how all these rabblerousers and farmers from the midwest are totally buried. nobody learns about it in us history, especially kids in Kansas.

it reminds me of the indie network you are constructing at 510
On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 6:14 PM, Anon195714 <anon195714@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
Anthony, I know you didn't mean "no grids," but I was concerned that a quick skim of this discussion by anyone who didn't know the material in depth, might lead to the wrong conclusions.

For an example of the danger of over-centralization:

Consider the conversion of the public switched telephone network to VOIP, in light of the desire on the part of telcos to reap a huge honking windfall by selling off their vast real estate holdings. AT&T owns about 5,000 central offices, at least one in just about every medium or larger city in the USA. Comcast has FIVE nationwide, and AT&T would love to do likewise, and conversion to VOIP will accomplish just that.

I'm sure you know what it's called when you centralize something by a factor of 1,000 to 1:

"A high-value target."

Something that's just begging to be hit hard and taken out, by a crazed dictator or an international terrorist group, or perhaps by a few sociopaths of the same kind who run ID theft rings and bank-card skimmer rings, or perhaps by someone out for the sheer thrill of smashing and wrecking.

The plans for the "smart power grid" will produce more high-value targets: regional power control systems, centrally managed, all internet-connected and just daring the assholes of the world to hit them.

Already, smart meters provide a tasty treat for predators. I'm aware of a couple of vulnerabilities that haven't been published, that would enable a single person with a grudge to black out a neighborhood for a couple of days. This situation will compound as smart meters, smart grids, and stupid regulatory officials converge.

All of this over-centralization, and over-reliance on "smart" things, is causing our entire society to crawl further and further out on a limb that becomes more and more fragile every day. Sooner than later, something will break, bigtime.

In a very practical sense, we have to be concerned with resilience.

About which more in my next post.

-G.

=====
On 13-03-26-Tue 5:28 PM, Anthony Di Franco wrote:
To be clear, I don't mean to say "no grids!1!!1!!!" but just "use large-scale grids only for what they're best for in the context of a broader heterogeneous system, not for almost everything as they are now, and take into account in a rigorous way overall system efficiency and other concerns like vulnerability to failures both routine and rare and corruptibility of the social systems that grow up around the technical systems."

I remember discussing these points a few times in the past with you, George, and Hol, and others around sudo room; might we like to get some documentation together on interesting specifics? A section of the wiki maybe, where we can throw ideas up about the details and see what sticks?
On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 5:06 PM, Anon195714 <anon195714@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
A lot of the arguement against power grids is ultimately rooted in opposition to having our energy supply controlled by distant corporations whose decisions are not sustainable and not in our interests.

I agree that over-dependence on greedy corporations for vital infrastructure, merely for the sake of convenience, is a shortcut to servitude. Google is the worst offender, with its seductive Gmail and Google Voice offering "convenience" in exchange for intensive and intrusive surveillance, not only of those who use the services, but of everyone they communicate with. (Worst of all, Google Glass: "become a volunteer surveillance drone!")

The model we should be looking toward, to manage the power grid, is one of municipally-owned transmission infrastructure (the wires along the streets), and diversification of power producers (from individual households to the existing power utilities). Everyone would be paid the same rate for power they "upload" to the grid, and everyone would pay the same rate for power they "download." This would immediately level the playing field and provide an enormous incentive for all manner of renewable and new-tech power generation.

Further, the municipal ownership model should also apply to the wired telecoms grid: telephone and internet. (Even your mobile device is only "wireless" for the last half mile at most; the rest of the way it's as wired as my antique dial phones.) All of these things are using the public rights-of-way along the streets; they are arguably public rights-of-way in themselves, and as such, should be owned by the public.

The municipal internet of electricity would entail each local power producer (household or larger) having small storage capacity on-site, and a switching synchronized inverter to connect to the grid. An onboard microprocessor with an analog voltage sensors would monitor line power to determine when power should be uploaded to the grid or downloaded from the grid. Simple "net metering" would keep track of the billing.

The small decentralized battery packs would act primarily as buffers, to level out power production and consumption among users. Overnight and over multiple cloudy days, and during peak demand hours, the decentralized solar would be supplemented by other power sources such as micro-reactors and natural gas turbines.

The uniform pricing mechanism would prevent predatory "arbitrage" of electricity, and provide the incentive to install solar panels on every solar-accessible flat surface, even on bus shelters and other street kiosks.

The point-of-production microprocessors would be isolated from the internet to prevent cyber-attacks against the grid: the best kind of "smart grid" is one that self-regulates locally without being vulnerable globally.

I should also mention: Yes, electric automobiles can provide household power storage in the absence of having a grid, but a) not everyone owns or even wants an automobile, b) if you've drained your car battery pack overnight to power your house, it's not available the next morning to get you to work, and c) even if everyone could afford a new electric car, there are good reasons to reduce car ownership and usage in favor of bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, buses, and trains.

Beyond that, we should not be destroying our civic infrastructure in favor of requiring everyone to have their own i-Things or do without. Public phones, public bathrooms (do you really want to carry an i-Pee around?), public drinking fountains, public benches for sitting, public transport, etc.: are all civic goods that make the public sphere more user-friendly and accessible. A public power grid is another example, as with public water supply, public sewage treatment, and refuse disposal: life without those things would be worse than miserable.

Don't destroy it: reclaim it, revision it, and rebuild it.

-G.

=====

On 13-03-26-Tue 3:41 PM, Anthony Di Franco wrote:
Production of alternative energy can be and for most reasons probably should be much less centralized, equivalently, smaller-scale, than production of energy mostly is now. (Off-grid, as you mention, but very literally.)

Large-scale up front + large, complex distribution networks is revealed as an obsolete architecture; large scale distribution networks become relatively less important, so even if the answer to your question is no, which it probably isn't given crowdfunding and other disintermediated finance gaining momentum, it's moot, or at least of much less relative importance.

Put another way, when the most important goal is maximum efficiency rather than maximum centralization, large upfront capital investment + large, complex distribution network is stupid; proper accounting of all costs and benefits in a global rather than piecewise local sense reveals this now for agriculture, manufacturing, energy, ...

Even now, buffering between supply and demand is a constraint on grid architecture leading to great economic demand within the current paradigm for distributed storage / production of energy according to someone who came through sudo room whose name escapes me.

This loosely-drafted email brought to you by the slogan, "localize production, virtualize everything else" and the acronym STEMI compression.

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Romy Ilano <romy@snowyla.com> wrote:

Is it possible to create alternative energy distribution networks (biofuels/solar/ wind etc) that replace mainstream petrol and natural gas based energy without a large financial sector?

the vc system that funds these alternative energy start-ups piggy backs off the investment banks, etc. and big private equity and institutional investment funds. vcs are like a fly on the @ss of a financial hippo.

I haven't heard people discuss off-grid that much in the tech talks I've been to( which are excellent). Is there a conversation here that would show how off grid is a viable alternative, even if it's not a big money solution?

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 1:56 PM, <hol@gaskill.com> wrote:

this talk about imports and exports always reminds me of energy flow

compare 2011
https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2012/Oct/images/25306_LLNLUSEnergy2011650.jpg

with 2002
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/us/images/us_energyflow2002.jpg

fascinating

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