WiFi signals can measure heart rate

In telecommunications construction we are taught to make ample use of the "hammer test" when working on and around poles. The difference in sound between a good pole, a marginal pole and a completely rotten pole is quite significant.

You could of course just bury your lines.

Too expensive where I live. Rocks, hills and trees: the natural enemies of buried fibre and wireless networks. One of my competitors took 6 months to bury a cable in granite that would've been a 5 day aerial job.

Did you invent that thought from first principles without running face first into the brick wall of reality?

And I wonder why that hasn't been commonplace if its just that easy

I'm so glad you say that. Resi aerial is perfect in most locations. No dig, no service boxes in front yards, under someone's unpermitted driveway pour, ample power easily, a guy in a bucket truck is all you need. Trenchless works well when it can, but even reasonable infrastructure underground is twice as expensive. I love seeing a neighborhood lit up in fiber in 2-5 days and subscribers online at 1-10Gb in soooo many places. Keeps crews busy either way :D

its usually more complicated than that.

Repairing becomes a different kind of nightmare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-wQnWUhX5Y

When I lived in the countryside on a bit of land and needed to get fiber from the road to my house on my own dime, burying the line was 5-10x as expensive as suspending it.

It is commonplace in many parts of the world. Most (all?) of Europe, Australia, many places in Asia.

In outdoor rock climbing smacking rocks is an integral part of ensuring the rock you're trusting your life with is in fact worth trusting your life with.

And look where that got Germany; my hometown and neighbouring towns are mostly on ADSL or rarely VDSL if you’re lucky, because the big players don’t want anything to do with the cost and legal side.

Local municipalities establish de-facto monopolies and drive prices up, because they offer slightly faster and stable lines.

There is a joint effort by local utility companies in Mecklenburg and they’re trying to make things better, but anecdotally are also challenging to deal with.

My now residence here in the UK is not really rural and for years Giganet/CityFibre/toob promised gigabit soonTM for years and the date got delayed and delayed and delayed.

At least here in Denmark, they seem to have opted for installing bigger "pipes", instead of just laying down some fiber cables. Then in the future they can just push new cables through the pipes. An idea I bet they wish they had gotten the first time around.

That is not the reason that got Germany to have poor telecom infrastructure. We also have poor 4G/5G coverage without the need of any FTTH setups.

There is a common case of excessive bureaucracy and extremely conservative population (thank you, low birth rates) which is hindering any significant development in the country.

Only if you go outside well-secured sport climbs where you don't have to think about that (but still its a good idea to check the state of bolts for any visible damage due to rot and rust). And even then, some rocks are hollow and still can sustain next 5000 years of literally any climbing on them, some are more solid and will come off if somebody over 80kg hangs on them. So its more about calming one's mind rather than objective good quality test.

Most folks in Europe climb only sport routes, or then do some variant of proper alpinism once on wild unsecured terrain.

> a guy in a bucket truck is all you need

Downside is: a drunk guy in a truck is all you need to tear it down, not to mention natural disaster influence. And it's unsightly AF.

Yes, it's fast and cheap. That's how we got the situation that a backwater village in the midst of the "anus mundi" of Romania has XGPON for a few dozen euros a month, while you're lucky to get anything above 50M VDSL in Germany outside of large urban areas and 200M VDSL in urban areas.

But holy hell it's an eyesore to be in said village in Romania, look out the window and look at a bunch of fiber strung not even from a proper pole but from a tree. Takes the German expression "Kabelbaum" to a whole new level.

Yeah the reason ain't so much some cables in the ground but general byzantine bureaucratic obscurity of a state that you germans created (or allowed to be created) and maintain for yourself. Its far from the only issue stemming form it, and all are just symptoms of underlying dysfunctionalities. Also the population seems to mostly sit around waiting for politicians to fix all problems.

"So its more about calming one's mind rather than objective good quality test."

It is a bit more than that, but there is no objective foolproof test, no.

Max. 16Mbit in Berlin-Schöneberg here.

Even if a pole is taken out by a drunk driver that does not mean the cables are going to be severed. I've seen plenty of times when poles had to be replaced, but the communications cables remained undamaged in place due to the strength and tension of the supporting strand.

The bigger issue over the last 5 years in the area where my company operates is the number of dump trucks that leave the bed up. Given the weight of dump truck it is easy for them to pull down multiple poles when they catch the cables, although perhaps they are drunk drivers...

The GDR was deploying fiber, but the west is using capitalism as underlying mechanism so the fiber was left unused and even replaced by copper after reunification because why use the latest technology just yet when you can get people to pay both for the downgrade and the upgrade some decades later!

It's pretty sobering hitting a rock that looks like an integral part of the wall and it just goes THUNK.

Also where I live (a karst region) other expensive things we deal with are frost lines (frost heave is a real issue; water expands as it freezes, things in the ground don't stay in the ground if ice is expanding into their space) and limestone rock underfoot (sinkholes are a real issue; dig wrong or too deep or not carefully enough and cave in the ground right under you, or worse, someone's house right next to you).

Google Fiber wrecked entire city streets relearning these things the dumbest way possible (then left the street repair bills to the us the taxpayers, because of course they did).

And outdoor DSLAMs are invulnerable, to cars, vandalism, dog-piss, whatever? Ever walked by one in the middle of the night, when its cooling fans hum? Wanna live near that?

Cell towers need 'backhaul' too. Can't have them all microwave meshed.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optische_Anschlussleitung was not a thing of the GDR. Though one could think so, because of the ...errm... let's say 'mismanagement' :-)

That's what you get with arrogant and ignorant large bureaucracies, anywhere, anytime :-)

GPON outdoor units don't create any noise, they are purely passive.

Yes. But you've written about ugly and vulnerable infrastructure am "Arsch der Welt"/"JWD" first, and lamented about limited availability and performance of pink Telecomicstan VDSL in Teutonistan second. I've written about the latter, since I've heard them, because they are not passive.

There was fiber deployment in the GDR and plans to extend it already before the OPAL project, which came after reunification. I remember our East German CS network professor talking about it with passion but fail to find information online. Which doesn’t surprise me, since history is written by the winners. I trust his personal stories more than the lack of information online.

It could be. Even much stuff from the 'winners' from before common internet access is lost ;->

OTOH, considering how well the 'megabit-chip' went, I'm wondering wtf they'd do with fiber, at the times? For the military, agencies, ministries and some universities maybe, but for the masses? How common was the 'stinknormales telephon' in households, back then?