Why, create a subsidiary to bring wireless internet to the masses. At least those close enough to the right of way.
http://omaharotarynight.org/Speakers/c28647f5-84fa-4e95-b9d1-111ba8db1deb
http://www.breezeinternet.com/
I received a letter announcing this new service yesterday. It said UP employees get a discount.
Jeff
Shades of SPRINT…
Innovation! Hope this works out well and defrays some of the PTC cost.
Good GRIEF, Larry ! Ya, beat me to it! [:-^]
[ So some of these younger whipper snappers, will understand…] [:-,]
Southern
Pacific
Railroad
Internal
Telecommunications
[swg]
The UP tracks are just down the street from me, in a rural setting. Matter of fact, I hear the horn of a UP train right now. The Breeze website said service is not available to me. Hmmm.
This would (should) be a completely different infrastructure than the PTC. I would imagine that they would use existing buildings and towers to hang antennas and use extra fiber in the ROW to connect them together.
A neat thing about some of fixed wireless systems is that each customer’s home or business becomes a repeater expanding the reach.
Several years ago, there was a project that never materialized where they wanted to put a tower at every Walmart to do the same thing.
5G service from the cell providers has been shown to reach speeds up to 1Gb, but I am sure the communities targeted by Breeze are last on the plans for upgrade to 5G.
Rural Colorado mountain counties and communities are fighting placement of small cell to fiber towers in western and south central parts of the state. Some are arguing asthetics, but many others are upset they are not getting royalties for the placement of cell towers and f-o-c on railroad R/W (including 65 miles of fee owned R/W surrounding maybe 3+ miles of FGROW and conditional R/W deed corridor) … the dimestore lawyers are really stirring it up with some of the more gullible locals. The shortlines (2), generally win the cases, but lawyer fees crimp operating budgets that could be better spent on other things.
Railroads and Communcations are no strangers. The Pennsy had the Trainphone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trainphone. Amtrak had Trainphones on some of there routes in the 1980s before cell phone came in vouge
Such displays of unvarnished contempt for other professionals doesn’t really belong in a discussion. Ever wonder what some of them think of you?
Excerpt from transcript of NPR program All Things Considered, Oct. 15, 2012
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/15/162963607/sprint-born-from-railroad-telephone-businesses
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST: We’re going to linger for a minute more on Sprint and its remarkable family tree. The company has roots on one side in the Brown Telephone Company of Abilene, Kansas, founded in 1899, and, on the other, a railroad, the Southern Pacific. In fact, the name Sprint is an acronym. When it was first coined, the SPR stood for Southern Pacific Railroad. The Southern Pacific traces its roots back to the 1860s. It would later operate thousands of miles of track and the telegraph wire along those tracks. Here’s former Southern Pacific communications control wire chief Brijet Neff.
BRIJET NEFF: In 1972, a request came in from the president of the railroad to seek out a way to use our already existing communications lines for long-distance dialing.
BLOCK: Well, this was new territory for the railroad. By the mid-1970s, Neff says Southern Pacific was selling time on its extensive microwave communications system to privat
Cute but no cigar!
About 7 years back we had a pretty interesting, and wide ranging discussion about “RAILROAD ROW’S BEING USED FOR BURRIED CABLES”
Linked @ http://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/175779.aspx?page=1
{That Thread covered a lot of ground on the subject and also included discussions of ‘problems’ with original land and grant titles of original owning railroads.}
Since this current Thread has brought about Lawyers and how those “professionals” are getting into the discussion. The linked Thread has some pretty suscinct and germain comments.
Posted by anb740 on Tuesday, December 28, 2010 9:01 PM
"…I’ll try to shed a little more light on the legal ramifications of using Railroad Rights of Way for things other than actual railroad usage (i.e., laying fiber optic cables) Since I live in Georgia, I had the privilege watching of the Atlanta-Macon installation. Qwest/NS T-Cubed subsidiary teamed up around 2001 to lay this cable from Atlanta to Jacksonville via the old secondary CofG mainline to Macon and the former GS&F to Jacksonville. I was told that the initial installation cost was at least $36 million. This didn’t include the annual lease of the right of way by Qwest. Unfortunately, neither company bothered to look at whether doing any of this was actually legal! (with full time legal departments at both companies, you’d think someone would have caught on!)
Much of today’s railroad mainlines were built via government issued easements from the original property owners. A lot of these easements stipulated that the right of way could be used ONLY for railroad transportation and nothing else. It also couldn’t be subleased to another entity for non-railroad usage. Should the railroad be abandoned, the right of way reverts back to the current property owner unless the government takes it via eminent domain. (i.e., bike trails) Fi
The ownership of RR ROW has many - many answers and cannot be determined by discussuion here. But what can be discussed is what rights RR’s have in the use of their ROW. Some will remember the Western Union pole line along ROW’s which also had attached to the crossarms the RR’s own communication line; these existed until somewhat recently. Thus the pole lines were necessary for RR purposes and were never a contention.
By the same reasoning fiberoptic lines buried along the ROW could be used by the RR for its own communications in addition to the ‘FOL’ owners interests. The smart RR’s negotiated with that option even tho they may not immediately need that service; and then may elect to get RR service on the line at a later time.
There are and have been many occupancies of RR ROW which the bystander may assume are private but in some way provide for RR use, or are of a short term limit should the RR need the land for its own operations.
I was involved in designing and installing about 600 miles of fiber optic communications in Illinois. The system was designed with a ring architecture which provides reliable service in the event of the severence of any link. Signals are sent both directions around the loop and the receiving termination switches in nanoseconds to the alternate direction receiver in the event the normal direction is interrupted. Some cable is buried, some on poles, some in duct and some in power line static wire, It has had fiber cuts but no loss of service.
Also SPRINT installed a low count fiber cable along the C&NW and as their business grew, was able to change out the electronics to provide for the communications traffic growth using higher bandwith. Just as your computer has more speed and memory, so did fiber communications equipment grow in capacity.
When I was at Sprint in the late 90’s we had a fiber cut a day when SP was digging out the ditches between Banning and Palm Springs on the Sunset Route. As Electroliner stated the early systems carried a few hundred megabits (1e+6 bits) of traffic, systems installed today are capable of capacities in the terabit (1e+12) over the same glass installed in the 1980’s.
Lots of fiber optic cable has also been installed in the pipelines and electric infrastructure and along the RoW. As mentioned, this has caused some interesting legal battles.
Usually providing free service to the local schools or government facilities helps in clearing the way for permits.
So Power Lines would be a problem on the right of way unless they were used for eletrification?
I was involved in a campus-level installation of a data network. Fortunately, a six- or twelve- pair fiber was run to every building involved, making it much easier to add new networks and other technologies later.
So Power Lines would be a problem unless they were used for electrification.
There is no simple answer as there are so many RR title documents, laws and court decided applications. These issues cannot be decided with discussion on this site.