NTT subcontractors have been spotted doing something with the phone and fiber cables in the neighborhood this week, which might mean they are rerouting the fiber to us.
So Tod & I took an Infrastructure Walk this afternoon to see what’s been done. It’s not the first time we have walked the local roads looking at wires and manholes and trying to figure out the hidden map of where we live.
While we were out we saw at least a half a dozen cherry pickers with license plates from all over Japan. NTT has called in the troops and repairs are definitely happening.
But what are they doing? That was a fun puzzle. We had formed theories about how they might restore the fiber and most of them involved branching the existing cable and running it up one of two routes. Looks like they picked one but not exactly how we thought.
We walked along the road from 555 to the intersection of the Road to Heguri, where we know the fiber connections are live. And we found clues. And mysteries. There was a mix of old stuff and new parts. We looked at almost a kilometer of cables and utility poles along the way.
The photo above shows something significant. This mess of wires sits at the intersection of the road leading to the landslide and our road. If you look carefully, you’ll see a fiber cable on the left that’s been cut. Next to it there is a loop leading to a black box that in turn leads to a one of NTT’s grey fiber boxes. Tracing the cables out of the box, it looks like they might go out of frame at the bottom, which is the direction towards our house.
So did they bring a cable from Road to Heguri to here and splice it in at the grey junction box, cutting off the old cable that crossed the landslide area?
Looks like that is the case, because when we checked at home later, the 光回線 indicator on our ONU was lit. There is light in the fiber again. A big step forward.
That doesn’t mean we have service yet. The physical layer is present, but there’s administrative work remaining to get everyone back in service. It’s sort of complicated, but one cable* has 768 possible “ends” that need to be organised before we can have our Internet back.
*I am assuming our rural area has a small cable with 24 fibers split into 32 ends each; there are bigger cables carrying up to 192 fibers.
How that will happens is one of the mysteries. Are the splices from the new cable to the old cable an exact match? Or is the physical layer irrelevant and the assignments are done in a database somewhere?
I doubt we will find out, but I can let that remain a mystery as long as we get our fast Internet again. Writing blog posts over 4G is an exercise in patience.
Water Infrastructure Walks
Tod & I have taken infrastructure walks along the water system, too. Two weeks ago, we searched for and found the route the temporary overground water pipes take – along the overgrown historical mountain road to the temple.
Last autumn we traced the mysterious metal-clipped lines from the water pumping station and discovered they were a low-power remote sensing system from the 80s. That is one of the reasons that the Oyama area water service is likely to be replaced with something more efficient in the coming years.
And just this week, we stopped to check out one of the aqueducts along Nagasa Kaido. Nearly got swarmed by bees in pursuit of the plaque photo, but learned lots about the water systems – agricultural and drinking water – their sources and how Kamogawa has to buy water to meet demand in the summer.
The systems that support our lives are fascinating. I find it fun to look at them more deeply. How did things get this way? Smart people solved problems, committees made decisions, governments and private companies bankrolled implementation. We hardly ever think about all of that when we stream a movie or wash dishes, do we?
