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I was def feelin my own heights fear at the intro to this vid; i cud NVR do any kind of tower climb like that... Im more like John, celebratin bein able to manage to even stand as high up as a table xD Its not as bad for me in constructed buildings for the most part, but the open air structures and even overroad walkways (even the enclosed ones in malls, but esp moreso the open air ones like ped road crossins)... Yeah each of those gives me much fear. I can barely manage the over road paths, and the enclosed ones i can at least stand in the middle and feel less afraid of the fact that theres nothin beneath me and im relyin on the capitalists who built thw structure actually havin done a good job and not tried to pull any sneaky tricks to cut costs.... But i cud nvr climb even the small water tower in the small town i went to high school at xD Let alone climbin smth like a radio tower or one of these towers; nope nope nopety nope to all that heh, i dont even care to be on roofs of buildings or too near cliffs xD
Correction here. Centurylink is legally known as LUMEN now with their copper offered as Centurylink, Fiber as Quantum Fiber, and Mid-size to enterprise as LUMEN. also you forgot to mention Level 3 bought Global Crossing
@@AtomicFrontier As a game dev I was actually impressed with the animations and began contemplating how you did them, instead of listening to what you were saying. Thanks for sharing the details!
Same. I had to rewatch some segments because I was too fascinated by the visuals to pay attention. (There was nothing I hadn't seen before, but I didn't expect that quality and that amount in a TH-cam video.)
@@AtomicFrontier that's very cool. I've seen some Blender plugins which take a map and trawl the length to simulate a frame by frame growth, but you can't get the same kind of control over the timeline to make it 100% historically accurate like here (unless you split it up into an annoying amount of different pictures, I suppose)
Even at the effective EIRP on a TD3 system, it would barely have warmed him up. Neat to see him sitting on the “front porch” of a KS-15676…the porch was an optional part to suppress echo in areas where there wasn’t quite enough altitude to stop reflection from the ground
woah, was/is the power really *that* low? I know the directionality means you don't need kilowatts like a broadcast antenna, but I thought you'd still need a fair bit to travel 50km through potentially inclement weather etc
"Basically like a prism that can turn with light into a rainbow and a rainbow back into white light" It must be the best way to describe multiplexing that I've heard.
Not even making this up, today, the day this was released, I was on a road trip and I also photographed some long lines towers we drove by, and I thought to myself “it would have been cool for Tom Scott to do a video on long lines towers” and then I got home and found this video. I know no one will believe me and that’s ok, but I thought it was a funny coincidence.
I also had a funny coincidence watching this. I was on a flight home to Minneapolis after being away for a little while and was watching this video as we landed and all the sudden there's a shot of him walking across the 10th St bridge with downtown Minneapolis in the background. I crossed the bridge behind him like 30 minutes later.
Did you say “long line towers”? That would be why the video is recommended. Google listens through your phone for keywords to recommend you content and ads. You agree to it in the ToS and privacy agreement. You can even download the data that google has on you. Recordings from your microphone, your key presses, locations, purchases, history etc.
Not so much a coincidence, but I've seen these on tower's I've worked on (design, not construction) and wondered what the giant "Horn/Cone Antennas" were, all I knew was that they were big and heavy.
To me the most amazing part is that the waveguide effectively worked exactly like fiber optic does now, working on internal reflection through bends and kinks to get the signal all the way down the path, but decades earlier.
This is because radio waves work the same way as visible light, they're both part of the EMF spectrum at the end of the end. Regardless of that, that fact alone makes me fascinated by it.
@StringerNews1true, but as you go lower in frequency and approach cut-off of the fundamental mode, you essentially have total internal reflection off the walls (very long group delay), hence no propagation. What’s interesting at 5:15 that waveguide is excited in TE20 mode as evident by the offset probe.
@StringerNews1 Standing waves are possible by the 'reflectivity' of the walls to electric fields. Thus, the 'standing wave' and '[standing wave generated by] reflections off the walls' are, in some sense, identical pictures. You're right though in that it has nothing to do with TIR here, the reflectivity used by these kinds of waveguides is the same kind of reflectivity a mirror uses. Which also works by the same principle. Which is why we use silver in mirrors too, since it reflects well in visible spectrum frequencies too. Power at TIR is also very minimal at the boundary due to the 'same reflection overlap,' although it tends to have more of an evanescent field than conductive reflection. Also, waveguides admit a pretty wide frequency band (roughly 1.5 factor), not a single frequency - and that likely was separated into three smaller chunks. Well, technically, they admit anything higher than the cutoff frequency, but there is a ceiling as well for single-mode operation - which is the biggest difference to fibre optics, which pretty much always uses multi-mode operation. I say 'these types of waveguides' because there are *also* optical waveguides in use and being developed that use refractive TIR-like principles instead - much thinner than the usual fibre optic to work in single-mode operation ofc.
@@rfengr00 I wonder if it's actually combined, in that it's operating TE10 and also TE20 for the separate frequency bands rather than having multiple transmitters (and just eating efficiency losses)
Once again. You make the video come together SO smoothly. The next Tom Scott! Only I like your editing better. The floating info panels behind you are so good.
I worked for AT&T for 28 years, half of it for Long Lines. I miss it. I would be there to this day if it weren't for the three strokes. I visited stations like this many times, and worked in central offices linked by microwave to others. It was a good life.
@@msys3367 I just don't know. We had fiber optic cables which ran to them, but I think the Microwave towers that were still being used were still analog. They used A/D and D/A converters for the hops, but many of them were just used for pass-throughs by the time I came along. I left in 2021.
@@msys3367 Yes, in the late 1990s FCC license data for most of the sites still active then (at least the ones in the Washington DC metro area) showed them to be using digital modulation. I assume this was true nationwide, but I never looked up any of the license data for other sites outside the DC metro area. I'm not even sure if the FCC still has the license records anymore, it's been 25 years.
Hey, I have to say you're one of the most confident presenters ever. You truly "know" what you're talking about, and not just reading off a script. It really shows that you're showing us the knowledge, and not just telling it to us. Cheers
I live next to a Long Lines tower known as Lillyville (L5). It has a bunker, ventilation, water systems, and more. It's the main station of the Pittsburgh area, and no one knows what it is. It's a shame.
Honestly, it's better that the general public is unaware of these types of critical infrastructures. There's always some crazy goofball out there that wants to damage a power substation, etc. These kinds of things hide in plain sight without needing to be hardened against attack.
Bro what? You could convince me that this was Tom Scott in an alternate timeline. How have i never seen your content before? Its not even three minutes in and im already subscribed.
I met a guy named Bill Tripp who pioneered a bunch of microwave broadcast systems in the 70's. He built a recording studio in Sanford NC and I was working on a project there. I don't think he's still alive but he had all kinds of interesting stories about the good ole days. Quite a character.
That makes so much sense. I always wondered what these are and my parents were always just like "Antennaes" My kid brain was like "yeah of course, they're on a radio tower. Why do they look so weird tho"
The frequencies they used were much lower than modern antennas. Their waveguide was similar to massive pipes going up the tower. So the transmission lines were pretty solid suspended with springs to deal with shifting. Since it’s a solid pipe, the lines came into the bottom of the antenna and then reflected outward. Modern dishes use higher frequency, so smaller cables. And with modern manufacturing, can use semi flexible waveguide so that they can come right into the back of the antenna.
I worked for a few low latency/HFT firms back when the Spread networks line was built. A few months afterwards, the microwave link was quietly established. Making Spread networks almost irrelevant. Now I work at CME. It’s honestly been a blast. Exhausting, but a blast.
@@adambahe9309 HI, I love wireless communications, and was wondering if you knew the names of any of the companies that operate these microwave networks?
4:45 I know there is that meme about the rat that fried itself, but this is yet another example of eldritch horror from the perspective of the horror. Imagine just being a human, tucking into bed, and then whoops, you detonate, turns out you thought about something wrong and stepped into an eldritch laser-conveyorbelt. I mean, imagine being a pigeon, then suddenly the dude in front of you vaporizes.
I assume the "frying" bit was quite exaggerated. The pigeon would probably just be warmed up a tiny bit. Note the text that says it's the same wavelengths as a microwave oven, but using 4 Watts instead of 1000 Watts. 4 Watts of energy isn't gonna fry anyone, especially if you just fly through it. Even if a pigeon happens to enter the exact line of the beam and fly within it for a while, it will probably only be warmed up a bit.
@@taylankammer Adding to that, the beam is spread out over a far larger area than a microwave oven, so I doubt the pigeon would really feel anything unless it roosted directly in front of the transmitting antenna for an extended period of time.
Television was actually a major driver in AT&T pushing microwave radio relay. In the 50s, the major TV networks were eager to have a way to distribute programming nationally, and a single TV broadcast took a large percentage of the bandwidth of the coax systems in use at the time. The first major microwave route going from NY to Chicago was almost used entirely for TV. The leftover capacity was bonus phone capacity. Even then, 1 TV broadcast took the bandwidth of 1200 phone calls. My understanding also is that the later round conical antennas started showing up when they started using digital carrier systems instead of the old analog. I really wish folks would quit taking the horns down. Really wish there were more stories like one guy who bought one of the original concrete towers and even found the original delay lens antennas to restore it to its 1950s state.
I’ve literally never seen one of his videos, no idea who he is, never even heard his voice… saw one thumbnail and IMMEDIATELY, my brain went TOM SCOTT!
I am working for a telecomm company doing antenna systens over the summer between semesters and you described a lot of things on ways that I could have understood a lot better than what I was taught. Though my job has shown me one flaw with this. You would need to use an antenna system inside larger buildings if you were to use the internet from the towers since signal struggles with going through a lot of walls (especially higher frequencies with faster connection speeds)
Still using a radio antenna on the outside, you can cut down the latency significantly even if you have to resort to fiber the last 50 meters when we are talking half a continent in total distance. And for my smart phone, internet over radio works reasonably well using cellular technology. The towers are relay towers and point to point, our computer society used a microwave link to create internet access from studen accomodations to the university back in 1993 because digging down an optic fibre would have been too expensive. (And yes, we had the optic fibre cable donated, but crossing among other things a motorway would have been problematic).
@@surters Yes, originally. All the original cellular towers used PTP microwave to link them to the cellular company central offices (switching centers). However, as fiber deployments increased and became more cost-effective, many of those PTP links have been replaced with fiber to the towers. That is especially prevalent in the urban and suburban areas where fiber is widely built out. However, microwave PTP is still prevalent outside the cities serving more rural settings. As a side note, the increasing miniaturization of many cellular sites allows fiber runs up the tower, placing the RF base station equipment at the tower top, removing the need for long, expensive copper feedlines. With high copper prices, reducing this need for feedline saves a fair amount of money, as well as reducing the need for the expensive accessories (SPDS, grounding kits, antenna jumpers. etc.)
I don't think Long Lines was ever really used for dial-up Internet. As you mentioned, the network was fully decommissioned by 1992, but the first graphical web browser didn't appear until 1993. Sure, the Internet existed before then, but it was mostly just academics and government agencies. Dial-up Internet mostly relied on local Points of Presence, or POPs, that you dialed in to. This avoided expensive long distance calls.
Agreed. And the other thing is, I'm pretty sure there's already a TON of other videos about Long Lines. I feel like pretty much everything now is just being rehashed and regurgitated, with just a slightly different spin. It looks like he put in a bunch of effort, which I'm not discounting.
People are easily wowed by motion graphics so don’t question the narrative. His description of the proliferation of long lines’ use in trading is also inaccurate but nobody is going to care 🙃
@@grabasandwich I think the point was that microwave communications was in a sense rediscovered as a means to use its lower latency to get a competitive edge on financial transactions.
I wonder what physical plant the NSFnet 56k backbone traveled over. I don't know when the first transcontinental fibers went in, but I don't see a reason that some segments of the backbone couldn't have ridden microwave carriers.
I have seen many videos like this with elegant visualization editing but yours. Your editing is different. I can't put it into words but it is very. . .pleasing and so fluid. I been replay a part where visualization turn up and it make my neuron happy.
As the owner of a Wireless ISP I love this video. You really need to look into the gear at the top of this tower called Tarana. They are doing crazy things with it.
You deserve to have so many more subscribers. I subscribed back when you were first featured by Tom Scott and I'm surprised your channel hasn't blown up. Definitely one of the highest quality channels in the TH-cam educational space.
In the 1950s I was doing this stuff with G.E.C. setting up the UHF backbone for telephone and tv services all over the UK. Yes we needed a strong head for heights from 100ft to over 1,000ft, no safety kit whatsoever, along with a deep knowledge of waveguide techniques, Fresnel zone reflections and 4/3 earth radius geography. Fascinating work!
This immediately reminded me of Tom Scott due to its presentational style, but I think you've made the style even better with really good graphics that really intutively describe ideas like microphone->electricity->speaker transmission, the floating pictures, I think all of it is just really well done!
Very nicely done. I REALLY appreciate how you modeled the sound waves as pressure waves and not oscillations. Sound being waves of high and low pressure is one of those things I think we need to be teaching a lot more.
Great content, great delivery! This was incredibly interesting to me with my interest in networking and the telephone systems used throughout our history.
4:39 rather than multiplexing, which switches between signals, by modulating different carriers, they can be simply summed together and proper filtering in the demodulation step, as is done with radio, will remove the other bands. at least that’s my understanding as someone with non-radio related dsp and electronics experience
Here because the legendary Tom Scott has just given you a massive shout out in his weekly newsletter. I've gotta say I'm impressed and have subscribed.
In 1999 when I worked for Siemens HVAC Controls Devising, I spent two days traveling with an AT&T technician to towers through out the Mojave Desert to load the temperature controls with a Y2K upgrade.
Yes!! Was doing some reading and research on these after seeing one off Highway 70 attached to an underground bunker. Most insightful video I’ve seen thus far! Thank you!
Microwaves are very weak forms of light. Especially in the case of these towers, it’s only a few watts that is being thrown at him. This power wouldn’t even be able to burn his skin
@@EuroGuardian yeah I don’t know a whole lot about this stuff, but those FM towers output thousands of watts of I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen a dude listening to songs through the arcs that were made near those things lol
@@Incompetent_Matt AM transmitting works differently to FM. You can get fried by an AM transmitter because the entire antenna structure is the transmitter, while the transmitters on FM are located on the top of the tower and work differently.
Great video as always, Jimbo! Love how you got access to climbing all over one of the LL towers - unrelated to any explanations, but shows a real flair, and elevates (heh) the video. Tell Captian Sailout I said ahoy
The old fashioned phones did not use magnetic microphones. They used a carbon mike that changed how much current went through the circuit. This way amplification was not needed.
The title is a bit misleading, but this is a good video. In 2008, much of the rural areas across Canada were still using dialup internet service or traditional satellite access at around 1mbps which had a minimum latency of 1500ms. When new satellites were launched by HughesNet (provider for Barrett Xplornet), latency was cut in half. Now with Starlink, people in rural Canada can enjoy 140mbps at latencies of less than 50ms. So while the title of the video here says the internet isn't as fast as it used to be, for rural Canadians, it's definitely a lot faster than it used to be.
Yeah, with the number of videos already out there about Long Lines, I'm surprised he missed the mark on that. Unless I'm misunderstanding him saying 100 km?
@StringerNews1 Thanks for the clarification. These platforms used to be so great but now there's just too much content. Maybe we should go back to encyclopaedias 😂 Seems parts of the dead internet theory are true.
Wired still better for gaming. Pretty hard to beat the connection stability, bandwidth, and latency of fibre optic. Though I'd imagine true 5G works best in suburban areas just like how fibre optic works best in dense urban areas. Cost verses outcome.
09:45 I was afraid that the laser was gonna get you in your eye; it was pointed at your face a lot, and at one point you accidentally pressed it off to the side of your face.
Basically he's taking about latency rather than throughput - you could get a single piece of information through this network faster than through the modern fibreoptic links simply because the speed of light is slower in glass. But consumers usually think in terms of throughput not latency, so the modern internet is far faster by that metric.
@@michaelraab5669 Processing of the data's speed is irrelevant as the longlines/microwave links can't carry a fraction of what the highest throughput fibers can transfer. As a crude analogy, longlines/microwave are sending a drop of water a second, while fiber is sending 5 gallons of water every second and a half.
@@michaelraab5669Yes, throughput is what you think of as data speed, eg 500 Mb/s. As the other poster said it can be conceptualized as flow rate, or the amount of water coming through a faucet per second. I'm making this post because what they explained poorly was actually latency. Presumably they went from a drop a second to 5 gallons in a second and a half because the denominator is supposed to represent latency, but that doesn't make sense. 5 gallons in 1.5 seconds is a roundabout way of saying 3.33 gallons per second, and the latency does not actually affect the throughput like this; the two are not intrinsically linked like that. Rather, latency is the delay before a request is processed and transfer begins. A better analogy, then, is that longlines are like turning your bathroom faucet on and a trickle starts coming out so soon after that it feels instant, and modern fibre optic is like turning your bathtub on full blast and it comes out like a firehose and fills the tub in seconds once it starts to flow, but takes a second after you turned the knob for the flow to start at all. If you play online games or use voip, it's your ping, that thing that makes other people rubberband around in a game or makes it appear to take a couple of seconds before the other person in a call responds to what you say (they're probably responding as soon as they hear you) if it's too high. You can habe the fastest internet in the world and be able to download terabytes in a second, but if it's high-latency, live communications are going to be spotty and function poorly, as though you were calling from Mars. You can have crappy 5Mb/s broadband with very low latency, on the other hand, and it may take days to download a movie, but if the other person also has low-latency internet, voip calls will be almost like talking in person. That's the difference.
Just one little nit pick I have is at the start when you're wearing the harness. Try and tie off with the carabiners, I understand it probably took multiple takes to get the shot but the carabiners are there for your safety and it's best to have an anchor point then none especially when climbing a ladder without a cage and a very big drop past a single railing. Other than that great video mate.
I noticed in the beginning you were in Minneapolis for that shot over the river! Was the tower you were filming on top of also in Minnesota? Awesome video!
I remember stumbling upon one of your first videos and subscribing instantly to appreciate a new grand kid on the block. And now you being embraced by Tom Scott?! This is really great!
Love the video! Especially like the part where you walk on the bridge with the floating pictures. Very creative. I would like to suggest that you give units in both metric and imperil. Especially if making a video about infrastructure in the United States.
@@toxicbavariankitten I fully agree with the adoption of metric, even though I'm an American engineer who doesn't work in metric (clients pick for me...).
@AndyGneiss Weird thing is, the US seems to have adopted only metric partially which is like ???? (confusing af). Like "This area is 73 big macs × 52 metres" (ofc this example is hyperinflated to highlight the sheer stupidity, please dont take offense)
@@toxicbavariankitten No offense taken. I also find it ridiculous at times. I went through a university engineering degree where we had to learn both systems of units. Many of the formulas made for metric units versus the ones for otherwise seemed easier to use. And that's just one random example from years ago.
@@toxicbavariankitten I don't think that's ever going to happen. Metric may be easier to use when you need an exact measurement, but imperial is easier to estimate. Most units in imperial are based off the body, for example an inch is the width of an average thumb. A foot is the length of an average foot. A yard is from the center of the chest to the tips of the fingers. A pace is two steps and a mile is 1,000 paces approximately. Not to mention Fahrenheit versus Celsius. I don't know why anyone would want to use celsius. It's used for computer CPU temps and 3D printers it drives me nuts. Fahrenheit 0 to 100 it's similar to 0% to 100% anything outside of that is an extreme. Celsius the same thing would be 0 to 37 not only is that a smaller range, it's a lot harder to picture We estimate way more often than we measure exactly. And anyone who grew up imperial is not going to switch unless they had a real need to. Machining for example. And I absolutely think imperial is much better for everyday use and for being exact metric definitely has its place (but not Celsius)
I remember first learning about Long Lines when I saw a horn on the top of a skyscraper in Oakland. Once I knew what they were I started seeing them everywhere, from downtown to the middle of nowhere. It's fascinating to see the old abandoned infrastructure that connected the country still in place
It's a shame that you're in Minneapolis only after the Northwestern Bell Telephone/Lumen Technologies building removed all their long-lines antennas. 1:00
I see alot of people compering you to The Great Tom Scott. In this case the comparison is one of the biggest compliments a human can give a youtuber. Your videos are edited good, researched and you just seem like a nice chap. 😊
There’s an old tower in the downtown of my city, it’s really neat to look at. I’m fairly certain that it’s been aqired by the government for use as a backup telecom link been 4 strategic bases all around it.
0:12 i think he is confusing velocity with bandwidth. And you probably meant to say speed since velocity doesn't even make sense in this context. And fiber has something like 10 to 100 the bandwidth of microwave so not sure what this guy is talking about. Cool topic but maybe not use colorful nonsense like faster then the speed of light.
I know, it's a distinction nearly nobody makes but you should really call "bandwidth", by which I mean something like Gbit/s, data rate. Bandwidth comes from the usable width of a band in the spectrum, e.g. 160MHz for modern WiFi but what most of you are interested in is the rate at which you can transmit data bits, which should be called binary symbols. The bit originally comes from information theory and means a binary decision (statistically). As you can get bit/symbol as unit, e.g. using QAM/ASK/PSK for modulation. If you use 16QAM, you can transmit a total of 4 bit per symbol, here the bit means the information bit and can be used as the bit we all know from computer science. The last bit (pun intended) is not really important, since they mean nearly the same but bandwidth is actually not right. I wanted to nerd out a bit here, don't take this too seriously.
@@Mefistofy I think it goes back to the old days when a flash website could take 20 seconds to load. Then increased bandwidth could kind of increase the loading speed of the page. But today 500 Mb isn't any faster than 1 Gb unless you are doing torrents or something, even then you are limited by how much traffic the servers will provide. Speed has become a misleading marking term that I despise seeing used in regards to anything technical. My other pet peeve is when someone uses a vector when they mean a scalar :)
His "joke" is that the speed of light (in fibre) has been "broken" by using microwave links, the radiation between which propagates at about the speed of light, whereas in fibre it is 2/3rds thereof, not half like he says. The phase velocity of light in fibre is reduced, but the carrier (light) is so high frequency (100s THz) compared to microwave (GHz) that more bandwidth is possible, which makes the symbol rate in fibre higher.
Yes, he's oversimplified the terms too much. Microwave links have lower latency "lag", but also less bandwidth (mbps). "high speed trading" involves small amounts of information so you don't need much bandwidth, but latency is key. The reason why it appeared the guy "broke the speed of light" was because he didn't disclose how his company was transferring data, only that they could do it faster than anyone else. Obviously the competition figured it out eventually.
There's a bit of improvements to be made about the sound modulation between music and voice in the video, but apart from that, the editing is extremely smooth and the documentary very enjoyable. I especially like the synthwave musical theme. Fascinating topic I did not even knew it existed, thanks a lot for sharing those shots and explanations, I'll be sure to follow you. As it seems others are doing it, here are my kind regards from France
This is wonderful and I'm glad to have come across this channel. Sidenote: people didn't say "streamed" during the 20th century, they would say "broadcast" or "live cast" also starting in the 1960s it became common for TV news to emphasize if something was "live via satellite"
Not a great time to be afraid of heights.
See all sides of every story and broaden your perspective at ground.news/AtomicFrontier. Subscribe this month to receive 40% off unlimited access.
this is not true of all frequencies, the antenna type depneds on mhz/hz ... fyi he is right just not 100% always
I was def feelin my own heights fear at the intro to this vid; i cud NVR do any kind of tower climb like that... Im more like John, celebratin bein able to manage to even stand as high up as a table xD
Its not as bad for me in constructed buildings for the most part, but the open air structures and even overroad walkways (even the enclosed ones in malls, but esp moreso the open air ones like ped road crossins)... Yeah each of those gives me much fear. I can barely manage the over road paths, and the enclosed ones i can at least stand in the middle and feel less afraid of the fact that theres nothin beneath me and im relyin on the capitalists who built thw structure actually havin done a good job and not tried to pull any sneaky tricks to cut costs....
But i cud nvr climb even the small water tower in the small town i went to high school at xD Let alone climbin smth like a radio tower or one of these towers; nope nope nopety nope to all that heh, i dont even care to be on roofs of buildings or too near cliffs xD
....that ad spot was good, way better than most creators do for their sponsors
Correction here. Centurylink is legally known as LUMEN now with their copper offered as Centurylink, Fiber as Quantum Fiber, and Mid-size to enterprise as LUMEN. also you forgot to mention Level 3 bought Global Crossing
bro thinks he is Tom Scott.
Tom Scott's designated sucessor is doing well.
Even has an accompanying pirate persona now, Captain Sailout!
Agreed! I pressed Subscribe.
Well he beats Tom in visuals and content dencity. On other hand Tom was much better in getting into obscure, but interesting places.
@@ViktorRzh I am sure we are getting there
@@mfaizsyahmi at least he's not a pirate gay assassin
As an engineer I have never ever ever seen visualisations this good
Thanks! Had tp code my own python network renderer for the line growth shots. Took a week to make those!
@@AtomicFrontier As a game dev I was actually impressed with the animations and began contemplating how you did them, instead of listening to what you were saying. Thanks for sharing the details!
Same. I had to rewatch some segments because I was too fascinated by the visuals to pay attention.
(There was nothing I hadn't seen before, but I didn't expect that quality and that amount in a TH-cam video.)
@@AtomicFrontier that's very cool. I've seen some Blender plugins which take a map and trawl the length to simulate a frame by frame growth, but you can't get the same kind of control over the timeline to make it 100% historically accurate like here (unless you split it up into an annoying amount of different pictures, I suppose)
@@AtomicFrontier Appreciate the effort you put into the video
That final shot of him sitting in front of the horn gave me a bit of a heart attack. I KNOW it’s powered off, but still…
He was tied off too.
Even at the effective EIRP on a TD3 system, it would barely have warmed him up. Neat to see him sitting on the “front porch” of a KS-15676…the porch was an optional part to suppress echo in areas where there wasn’t quite enough altitude to stop reflection from the ground
was it..?
@@MelroyvandenBerg It was.
woah, was/is the power really *that* low? I know the directionality means you don't need kilowatts like a broadcast antenna, but I thought you'd still need a fair bit to travel 50km through potentially inclement weather etc
bro IS Tom Scott
This guy is filling his shoes quite nicely
*Always has been*
This guy is better than Tom imho
@@lornenix2243 I agree
I found this channel when he filled in for Tom Scott one week@@narutobroken
"Basically like a prism that can turn with light into a rainbow and a rainbow back into white light" It must be the best way to describe multiplexing that I've heard.
In fiber optics, that's not so far from the truth. Look up WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) if you want to find out more.
Saving this
Yeah fibre optics basically do that with whatever shade of a color or carrier signal they're designed for.
as long as you address signals that do not interfere with each other...you're right 😁.
But TDMA or CDMA .. it's not as simle and flawles as that 😜🙂
Not even making this up, today, the day this was released, I was on a road trip and I also photographed some long lines towers we drove by, and I thought to myself “it would have been cool for Tom Scott to do a video on long lines towers” and then I got home and found this video. I know no one will believe me and that’s ok, but I thought it was a funny coincidence.
I also had a funny coincidence watching this. I was on a flight home to Minneapolis after being away for a little while and was watching this video as we landed and all the sudden there's a shot of him walking across the 10th St bridge with downtown Minneapolis in the background. I crossed the bridge behind him like 30 minutes later.
The microchip in your brain. 😅
Did you say “long line towers”? That would be why the video is recommended. Google listens through your phone for keywords to recommend you content and ads. You agree to it in the ToS and privacy agreement.
You can even download the data that google has on you. Recordings from your microphone, your key presses, locations, purchases, history etc.
@@slowanddeliberate6893 Good one -- I've heard that "tin foil' can slow down overlord messaging. Ha...
Not so much a coincidence, but I've seen these on tower's I've worked on (design, not construction) and wondered what the giant "Horn/Cone Antennas" were, all I knew was that they were big and heavy.
Video is so good people didn't realize the danger of climbing that tower especially sitting on the dish at the end
Yup, definitely don't trespass to visit them! I was joined by one of the tower workers who helped with safety and site access.
@@illuminoeye_gaming The sentence completely changes when you realise that it says don't, not didn't.
@@illuminoeye_gaming What?
@@illuminoeye_gamingReread what he said again.
@@illuminoeye_gamingread again
4:51 Sir, please tell me why your pigeon sounds like a chicken?
Like a minecraft chicken, no less!
Everyone knows a pigeon in a microwave sounds like a chicken. Chicken is the default death flavor AND death noise.
@@korbindallas4552 You mean he murdered a pigeon? Not cool, not cool at all!!
@@TheClumsyFairy It's just a flying rat.
Not by accident, hypnotists use this all the time, it's one of the old and more shallow plays in the book.
Dude, that ending shot was incredible.
The rest was clear, concise and never boring. You're crushing it. Well done Sir.
To me the most amazing part is that the waveguide effectively worked exactly like fiber optic does now, working on internal reflection through bends and kinks to get the signal all the way down the path, but decades earlier.
This is because radio waves work the same way as visible light, they're both part of the EMF spectrum at the end of the end. Regardless of that, that fact alone makes me fascinated by it.
@StringerNews1true, but as you go lower in frequency and approach cut-off of the fundamental mode, you essentially have total internal reflection off the walls (very long group delay), hence no propagation. What’s interesting at 5:15 that waveguide is excited in TE20 mode as evident by the offset probe.
Amazing video
@StringerNews1 Standing waves are possible by the 'reflectivity' of the walls to electric fields. Thus, the 'standing wave' and '[standing wave generated by] reflections off the walls' are, in some sense, identical pictures.
You're right though in that it has nothing to do with TIR here, the reflectivity used by these kinds of waveguides is the same kind of reflectivity a mirror uses. Which also works by the same principle. Which is why we use silver in mirrors too, since it reflects well in visible spectrum frequencies too.
Power at TIR is also very minimal at the boundary due to the 'same reflection overlap,' although it tends to have more of an evanescent field than conductive reflection.
Also, waveguides admit a pretty wide frequency band (roughly 1.5 factor), not a single frequency - and that likely was separated into three smaller chunks.
Well, technically, they admit anything higher than the cutoff frequency, but there is a ceiling as well for single-mode operation - which is the biggest difference to fibre optics, which pretty much always uses multi-mode operation.
I say 'these types of waveguides' because there are *also* optical waveguides in use and being developed that use refractive TIR-like principles instead - much thinner than the usual fibre optic to work in single-mode operation ofc.
@@rfengr00 I wonder if it's actually combined, in that it's operating TE10 and also TE20 for the separate frequency bands rather than having multiple transmitters (and just eating efficiency losses)
The production quality of this video is really phenomenal.
Once again. You make the video come together SO smoothly. The next Tom Scott! Only I like your editing better. The floating info panels behind you are so good.
Agreed, this guy is editing his leagues above Tom Scott
too long
Right down to the pirate costume.
@@narutobrokenthis shit better have good editing, tom was pumping those vids out on a short consistent schedule.
@@hero3717may I recommend"half as interesting" and also stop commenting
we are now in the era of youtube content creators who make better videos then TV shows do.
I worked for AT&T for 28 years, half of it for Long Lines. I miss it. I would be there to this day if it weren't for the three strokes. I visited stations like this many times, and worked in central offices linked by microwave to others. It was a good life.
Was the long lines links ever digitalized (PCM/T1/Nx64kbit) or was it purely analog multiplexing?
@@msys3367 I just don't know. We had fiber optic cables which ran to them, but I think the Microwave towers that were still being used were still analog. They used A/D and D/A converters for the hops, but many of them were just used for pass-throughs by the time I came along. I left in 2021.
@@msys3367 Yes they switched to the DR6 radios at some point that were digital.
@@msys3367 Yes, in the late 1990s FCC license data for most of the sites still active then (at least the ones in the Washington DC metro area) showed them to be using digital modulation. I assume this was true nationwide, but I never looked up any of the license data for other sites outside the DC metro area. I'm not even sure if the FCC still has the license records anymore, it's been 25 years.
Sorry about your health incidents. Hope you are doing okay
Hey, I have to say you're one of the most confident presenters ever. You truly "know" what you're talking about, and not just reading off a script. It really shows that you're showing us the knowledge, and not just telling it to us. Cheers
There's totally a script
@@aone9050 There's certainly a script, but what he's saying is that the presenter wrote the script so he knows what he's actually talking about.
Tom Scott reincarnated, holy shit.
Except this kid doesn't look like a lesbian
I live next to a Long Lines tower known as Lillyville (L5). It has a bunker, ventilation, water systems, and more.
It's the main station of the Pittsburgh area, and no one knows what it is. It's a shame.
Honestly, it's better that the general public is unaware of these types of critical infrastructures. There's always some crazy goofball out there that wants to damage a power substation, etc. These kinds of things hide in plain sight without needing to be hardened against attack.
Bro what? You could convince me that this was Tom Scott in an alternate timeline. How have i never seen your content before? Its not even three minutes in and im already subscribed.
Yoo, 10/10. Love your vids from Australia. Just awake enough to catch this one.
Ive been a Tom Scott viewer for quite sometime and I have to say youre the most worthy on youtube rn to be his successor you have a bright future
agreed fully
i'm emailing tom and i will definitely tell him that, hehe
I met a guy named Bill Tripp who pioneered a bunch of microwave broadcast systems in the 70's.
He built a recording studio in Sanford NC and I was working on a project there.
I don't think he's still alive but he had all kinds of interesting stories about the good ole days. Quite a character.
That makes so much sense. I always wondered what these are and my parents were always just like "Antennaes"
My kid brain was like "yeah of course, they're on a radio tower. Why do they look so weird tho"
The frequencies they used were much lower than modern antennas. Their waveguide was similar to massive pipes going up the tower. So the transmission lines were pretty solid suspended with springs to deal with shifting.
Since it’s a solid pipe, the lines came into the bottom of the antenna and then reflected outward.
Modern dishes use higher frequency, so smaller cables. And with modern manufacturing, can use semi flexible waveguide so that they can come right into the back of the antenna.
I worked for a few low latency/HFT firms back when the Spread networks line was built. A few months afterwards, the microwave link was quietly established. Making Spread networks almost irrelevant. Now I work at CME. It’s honestly been a blast. Exhausting, but a blast.
Thank you for FUCKING investors. Tell Manoj Narang I send my regards.
@@adambahe9309 HI, I love wireless communications, and was wondering if you knew the names of any of the companies that operate these microwave networks?
4:45 I know there is that meme about the rat that fried itself, but this is yet another example of eldritch horror from the perspective of the horror. Imagine just being a human, tucking into bed, and then whoops, you detonate, turns out you thought about something wrong and stepped into an eldritch laser-conveyorbelt.
I mean, imagine being a pigeon, then suddenly the dude in front of you vaporizes.
The idea of accidentally thinking something eldritch and spontaneously detonating is fascinating.
@@OrchidAlloy Spontaneous combustion.
Never really thought of it that way but you're totally right
I assume the "frying" bit was quite exaggerated. The pigeon would probably just be warmed up a tiny bit. Note the text that says it's the same wavelengths as a microwave oven, but using 4 Watts instead of 1000 Watts. 4 Watts of energy isn't gonna fry anyone, especially if you just fly through it. Even if a pigeon happens to enter the exact line of the beam and fly within it for a while, it will probably only be warmed up a bit.
@@taylankammer Adding to that, the beam is spread out over a far larger area than a microwave oven, so I doubt the pigeon would really feel anything unless it roosted directly in front of the transmitting antenna for an extended period of time.
Television was actually a major driver in AT&T pushing microwave radio relay. In the 50s, the major TV networks were eager to have a way to distribute programming nationally, and a single TV broadcast took a large percentage of the bandwidth of the coax systems in use at the time. The first major microwave route going from NY to Chicago was almost used entirely for TV. The leftover capacity was bonus phone capacity. Even then, 1 TV broadcast took the bandwidth of 1200 phone calls. My understanding also is that the later round conical antennas started showing up when they started using digital carrier systems instead of the old analog.
I really wish folks would quit taking the horns down. Really wish there were more stories like one guy who bought one of the original concrete towers and even found the original delay lens antennas to restore it to its 1950s state.
I hate seeing the horns removed too. :-( I am always thrilled to spot them when traveling!
This guy must have money or connections. I can't imagine telecoms ever allowing someone short of a documentary team to film this on site
Lots of patience! Took a year to find someone with a tower via a long lines fan group
You know what you must do. *Say it.*
@@bndlett8752 What?
@@sanguineel You know... your profile picture...
@@bndlett8752 I use Arch by the way
I’ve literally never seen one of his videos, no idea who he is, never even heard his voice… saw one thumbnail and IMMEDIATELY, my brain went TOM SCOTT!
Give this guy 5 years and he will be a 70 year old man with silver hair .
Thought I seen him glowing a lil
I am working for a telecomm company doing antenna systens over the summer between semesters and you described a lot of things on ways that I could have understood a lot better than what I was taught.
Though my job has shown me one flaw with this. You would need to use an antenna system inside larger buildings if you were to use the internet from the towers since signal struggles with going through a lot of walls (especially higher frequencies with faster connection speeds)
Still using a radio antenna on the outside, you can cut down the latency significantly even if you have to resort to fiber the last 50 meters when we are talking half a continent in total distance.
And for my smart phone, internet over radio works reasonably well using cellular technology. The towers are relay towers and point to point, our computer society used a microwave link to create internet access from studen accomodations to the university back in 1993 because digging down an optic fibre would have been too expensive. (And yes, we had the optic fibre cable donated, but crossing among other things a motorway would have been problematic).
Yup! So this system just went between towns basically. Inside you'd still run copper between houses and the hub point
Don't you use microwave between cell towers or to a central tower?
@@surtersmost cell towers have a direct link to the internet via fiber. Though I'm sure more rural ones may daisy chain from one tower to another.
@@surters Yes, originally. All the original cellular towers used PTP microwave to link them to the cellular company central offices (switching centers). However, as fiber deployments increased and became more cost-effective, many of those PTP links have been replaced with fiber to the towers. That is especially prevalent in the urban and suburban areas where fiber is widely built out. However, microwave PTP is still prevalent outside the cities serving more rural settings.
As a side note, the increasing miniaturization of many cellular sites allows fiber runs up the tower, placing the RF base station equipment at the tower top, removing the need for long, expensive copper feedlines. With high copper prices, reducing this need for feedline saves a fair amount of money, as well as reducing the need for the expensive accessories (SPDS, grounding kits, antenna jumpers. etc.)
Thanks for giving me my much needed Tom Scott fix ❤
I don't think Long Lines was ever really used for dial-up Internet. As you mentioned, the network was fully decommissioned by 1992, but the first graphical web browser didn't appear until 1993. Sure, the Internet existed before then, but it was mostly just academics and government agencies.
Dial-up Internet mostly relied on local Points of Presence, or POPs, that you dialed in to. This avoided expensive long distance calls.
Agreed. And the other thing is, I'm pretty sure there's already a TON of other videos about Long Lines. I feel like pretty much everything now is just being rehashed and regurgitated, with just a slightly different spin. It looks like he put in a bunch of effort, which I'm not discounting.
People are easily wowed by motion graphics so don’t question the narrative. His description of the proliferation of long lines’ use in trading is also inaccurate but nobody is going to care 🙃
@@grabasandwich I think the point was that microwave communications was in a sense rediscovered as a means to use its lower latency to get a competitive edge on financial transactions.
I wonder what physical plant the NSFnet 56k backbone traveled over. I don't know when the first transcontinental fibers went in, but I don't see a reason that some segments of the backbone couldn't have ridden microwave carriers.
I had dial up in 1988.
I have seen many videos like this with elegant visualization editing but yours. Your editing is different. I can't put it into words but it is very. . .pleasing and so fluid. I been replay a part where visualization turn up and it make my neuron happy.
As the owner of a Wireless ISP I love this video. You really need to look into the gear at the top of this tower called Tarana. They are doing crazy things with it.
Profesional production qualitiy. This Is the same quality as the best stuff put out on Discovery channel
You deserve to have so many more subscribers. I subscribed back when you were first featured by Tom Scott and I'm surprised your channel hasn't blown up. Definitely one of the highest quality channels in the TH-cam educational space.
same :)
MY GOD.. My favorite topic, being covered in modern light. I Love IT!
Amazing video! One of the most understandable and complete writeups of the Long Lines systems I've seen.
I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned it, but you've got a very soothing voice. Great to see another Aussie taking on the world.
5:57 Hey cool, it's Black Mountain from Fallout: New Vegas!
😂😂😂😊
Yeah they built a real one, got the idea from NV as you rightly pointed out.
In the 1950s I was doing this stuff with G.E.C. setting up the UHF backbone for telephone and tv services all over the UK. Yes we needed a strong head for heights from 100ft to over 1,000ft, no safety kit whatsoever, along with a deep knowledge of waveguide techniques, Fresnel zone reflections and 4/3 earth radius geography. Fascinating work!
This immediately reminded me of Tom Scott due to its presentational style, but I think you've made the style even better with really good graphics that really intutively describe ideas like microphone->electricity->speaker transmission, the floating pictures, I think all of it is just really well done!
I’m still always mesmerized by the phenomenal tracking of text/pictures in these videos, absolutely flawless
Very nicely done. I REALLY appreciate how you modeled the sound waves as pressure waves and not oscillations. Sound being waves of high and low pressure is one of those things I think we need to be teaching a lot more.
Great content, great delivery! This was incredibly interesting to me with my interest in networking and the telephone systems used throughout our history.
4:39 rather than multiplexing, which switches between signals, by modulating different carriers, they can be simply summed together and proper filtering in the demodulation step, as is done with radio, will remove the other bands. at least that’s my understanding as someone with non-radio related dsp and electronics experience
Maybe it was because of the non-computer era, something current dsp era relies on.
Here because the legendary Tom Scott has just given you a massive shout out in his weekly newsletter. I've gotta say I'm impressed and have subscribed.
Keeping up the accent throughout the whole ad read is noteworthy!
that last shot was brilliant, camera work and editing overall was very good
The production value on these videos is insane.
Damn dude this one was really quite something well done!!
I really thoroughly enjoyed that, you clearly put a huge amount of effort into it.
I am a simple man - when I see a new Atomic Frontier video, I click on it
In 1999 when I worked for Siemens HVAC Controls Devising, I spent two days traveling with an AT&T technician to towers through out the Mojave Desert to load the temperature controls with a Y2K upgrade.
James did you even use your tether once? As someone who used to work at heights, that end shot is freaking me out!
Yup! It's in the final shot, just hidden pretty well
You can see the 6ft safety strap on the outro, he was tied off to standard. (From the tower guy who was behind the horn making sure.)
@@AtomicFrontierSo you deliberately composed the shot to make it a little more magical? and also to give field operators a heart attack of course
That timeline-bridge edit was amazing! Even though it was slightly out of sync, it looked awesome!
Tom Scott smiles down on this young man from the great beyond (retirement)
Yes!! Was doing some reading and research on these after seeing one off Highway 70 attached to an underground bunker. Most insightful video I’ve seen thus far! Thank you!
Are you getting blasted by RF at minute 10:45?
Microwaves are very weak forms of light. Especially in the case of these towers, it’s only a few watts that is being thrown at him. This power wouldn’t even be able to burn his skin
Got it; I used to climb cellphone towers and we just didn’t go in front of antennas, but the ones to watch out for were FM broadcast towers
@@EuroGuardian yeah I don’t know a whole lot about this stuff, but those FM towers output thousands of watts of I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen a dude listening to songs through the arcs that were made near those things lol
@@Incompetent_Matt AM transmitting works differently to FM. You can get fried by an AM transmitter because the entire antenna structure is the transmitter, while the transmitters on FM are located on the top of the tower and work differently.
Great video as always, Jimbo! Love how you got access to climbing all over one of the LL towers - unrelated to any explanations, but shows a real flair, and elevates (heh) the video.
Tell Captian Sailout I said ahoy
The old fashioned phones did not use magnetic microphones. They used a carbon mike that changed how much current went through the circuit. This way amplification was not needed.
Man i have seen these EXACT towers and never thought more about them other than "big antenna". These are FASCINATING
Say hi to your big bro Tom Scott. He must be proud!
good to see you do a video on long lines! i've always been absolutely fascinated by them
with the insane quality of your work i'm surprised you haven't started publishing on nebula. keep it up either way. love your work!
The title is a bit misleading, but this is a good video. In 2008, much of the rural areas across Canada were still using dialup internet service or traditional satellite access at around 1mbps which had a minimum latency of 1500ms. When new satellites were launched by HughesNet (provider for Barrett Xplornet), latency was cut in half. Now with Starlink, people in rural Canada can enjoy 140mbps at latencies of less than 50ms. So while the title of the video here says the internet isn't as fast as it used to be, for rural Canadians, it's definitely a lot faster than it used to be.
those strange looking horns were designed to reduce interference and noise to the signal. 40 miles was about the maximum for microwave radio
Yeah, with the number of videos already out there about Long Lines, I'm surprised he missed the mark on that. Unless I'm misunderstanding him saying 100 km?
@StringerNews1 Thanks for the clarification. These platforms used to be so great but now there's just too much content. Maybe we should go back to encyclopaedias 😂 Seems parts of the dead internet theory are true.
The visuals and the way you simplified every technical detail was amazing.
Would be interesting ISPs could do connections or switchovers to the microwave infrastructure for competitive gaming.
Wired still better for gaming. Pretty hard to beat the connection stability, bandwidth, and latency of fibre optic. Though I'd imagine true 5G works best in suburban areas just like how fibre optic works best in dense urban areas. Cost verses outcome.
@Demopans5990 We are the Wisp on the tower he took his video from on top of, our wisp has a max of 7ms of latency back to the data center.
That's pretty much what stock trading is.
@@mctscott123love my WISP connection
This is extremely well made! Gotta love how much work y’all put in it
bro lost his shadow 1:40
I think the sun came out
I've been obsessed with these towers for 10 years! Thank you so much for making this video.
The CLACKS!
GNU Terry Pratchett
An example of good ad. And ad that, despite being skipped, makes you go back to watch it.
11:04 Jack Horkheimer
May he rest in peace; Always loved watching Star Gazer late at night on PBS
Epic opening/closing sequences
09:45 I was afraid that the laser was gonna get you in your eye; it was pointed at your face a lot, and at one point you accidentally pressed it off to the side of your face.
The production quality in the first 90 seconds alone blew me away. Outstanding job!
Mere seconds in and I'm already hooked. Great work!
Have never seen such a clean youtube video before. The visualizations and story telling are next level!
You never explained how today's internet isn't as fast as yesterday's, though.
Basically he's taking about latency rather than throughput - you could get a single piece of information through this network faster than through the modern fibreoptic links simply because the speed of light is slower in glass. But consumers usually think in terms of throughput not latency, so the modern internet is far faster by that metric.
@JamesChurchill so throughput would be overall amount of data? Is processing the data slower via loneliness compared to fiber optic processors?
@@michaelraab5669 Processing of the data's speed is irrelevant as the longlines/microwave links can't carry a fraction of what the highest throughput fibers can transfer. As a crude analogy, longlines/microwave are sending a drop of water a second, while fiber is sending 5 gallons of water every second and a half.
@@michaelraab5669Yes, throughput is what you think of as data speed, eg 500 Mb/s. As the other poster said it can be conceptualized as flow rate, or the amount of water coming through a faucet per second.
I'm making this post because what they explained poorly was actually latency. Presumably they went from a drop a second to 5 gallons in a second and a half because the denominator is supposed to represent latency, but that doesn't make sense. 5 gallons in 1.5 seconds is a roundabout way of saying 3.33 gallons per second, and the latency does not actually affect the throughput like this; the two are not intrinsically linked like that.
Rather, latency is the delay before a request is processed and transfer begins. A better analogy, then, is that longlines are like turning your bathroom faucet on and a trickle starts coming out so soon after that it feels instant, and modern fibre optic is like turning your bathtub on full blast and it comes out like a firehose and fills the tub in seconds once it starts to flow, but takes a second after you turned the knob for the flow to start at all.
If you play online games or use voip, it's your ping, that thing that makes other people rubberband around in a game or makes it appear to take a couple of seconds before the other person in a call responds to what you say (they're probably responding as soon as they hear you) if it's too high. You can habe the fastest internet in the world and be able to download terabytes in a second, but if it's high-latency, live communications are going to be spotty and function poorly, as though you were calling from Mars. You can have crappy 5Mb/s broadband with very low latency, on the other hand, and it may take days to download a movie, but if the other person also has low-latency internet, voip calls will be almost like talking in person. That's the difference.
What great on location shots!
That shot in Minneapolis! Do you have an episode about water power coming?
They were in Minneapolis as the tower they were on was in northern Minnesota.
@@mctscott123 I was hoping they were at the Wyoming MN long-lines tower. From what I read about it, it was part of the Autovon system.
@MN-Hillbilly Thats an ATC owned site that AT&T leases back from ATC. It's still a very active site and has T-mobile on it too.
@@mctscott123 Thanks! That makes a bunch of sense!
Just one little nit pick I have is at the start when you're wearing the harness. Try and tie off with the carabiners, I understand it probably took multiple takes to get the shot but the carabiners are there for your safety and it's best to have an anchor point then none especially when climbing a ladder without a cage and a very big drop past a single railing. Other than that great video mate.
Great episode. Always enjoyed long lines lore
i love the editing and presentation style! you're on your way!
I noticed in the beginning you were in Minneapolis for that shot over the river! Was the tower you were filming on top of also in Minnesota?
Awesome video!
Yes, it was in northern Minnesota, it's a private site they had permission to be on.
I remember stumbling upon one of your first videos and subscribing instantly to appreciate a new grand kid on the block. And now you being embraced by Tom Scott?! This is really great!
Love the video! Especially like the part where you walk on the bridge with the floating pictures. Very creative.
I would like to suggest that you give units in both metric and imperil. Especially if making a video about infrastructure in the United States.
All it needs is for the USA to fully adopt metric :3
@@toxicbavariankitten I fully agree with the adoption of metric, even though I'm an American engineer who doesn't work in metric (clients pick for me...).
@AndyGneiss Weird thing is, the US seems to have adopted only metric partially which is like ???? (confusing af). Like "This area is 73 big macs × 52 metres" (ofc this example is hyperinflated to highlight the sheer stupidity, please dont take offense)
@@toxicbavariankitten No offense taken. I also find it ridiculous at times. I went through a university engineering degree where we had to learn both systems of units. Many of the formulas made for metric units versus the ones for otherwise seemed easier to use. And that's just one random example from years ago.
@@toxicbavariankitten I don't think that's ever going to happen. Metric may be easier to use when you need an exact measurement, but imperial is easier to estimate. Most units in imperial are based off the body, for example an inch is the width of an average thumb. A foot is the length of an average foot. A yard is from the center of the chest to the tips of the fingers. A pace is two steps and a mile is 1,000 paces approximately.
Not to mention Fahrenheit versus Celsius. I don't know why anyone would want to use celsius. It's used for computer CPU temps and 3D printers it drives me nuts. Fahrenheit 0 to 100 it's similar to 0% to 100% anything outside of that is an extreme. Celsius the same thing would be 0 to 37 not only is that a smaller range, it's a lot harder to picture
We estimate way more often than we measure exactly. And anyone who grew up imperial is not going to switch unless they had a real need to. Machining for example. And I absolutely think imperial is much better for everyday use and for being exact metric definitely has its place (but not Celsius)
"Pirate Sailout" was pretty funny 😂 Good job. And amazing job on the whole production!
The title of the video was very misleading, it barely touched anything to do with the Internet. Apart from that ,a good video.
Kind of like news articles today. Very little news. Lots of propaganda to make money.... There should be a law.
I remember first learning about Long Lines when I saw a horn on the top of a skyscraper in Oakland. Once I knew what they were I started seeing them everywhere, from downtown to the middle of nowhere. It's fascinating to see the old abandoned infrastructure that connected the country still in place
It's a shame that you're in Minneapolis only after the Northwestern Bell Telephone/Lumen Technologies building removed all their long-lines antennas. 1:00
They still have a good LL site in Plymouth, I've climbed it and worked on it. Has all of it's original horns and waveguide yet.
8:45 nice arrow antenna on the right of the image ! This yaggi is a ham workhorse!
Wondered if I was the only ham that noticed...also the call sign and other equipment
I see alot of people compering you to The Great Tom Scott. In this case the comparison is one of the biggest compliments a human can give a youtuber. Your videos are edited good, researched and you just seem like a nice chap. 😊
There’s an old tower in the downtown of my city, it’s really neat to look at. I’m fairly certain that it’s been aqired by the government for use as a backup telecom link been 4 strategic bases all around it.
0:12 i think he is confusing velocity with bandwidth. And you probably meant to say speed since velocity doesn't even make sense in this context. And fiber has something like 10 to 100 the bandwidth of microwave so not sure what this guy is talking about. Cool topic but maybe not use colorful nonsense like faster then the speed of light.
Yea I think he got too caught up in making a crazy intro hook for the video that it just ended up not really making sense
I know, it's a distinction nearly nobody makes but you should really call "bandwidth", by which I mean something like Gbit/s, data rate.
Bandwidth comes from the usable width of a band in the spectrum, e.g. 160MHz for modern WiFi but what most of you are interested in is the rate at which you can transmit data bits, which should be called binary symbols.
The bit originally comes from information theory and means a binary decision (statistically). As you can get bit/symbol as unit, e.g. using QAM/ASK/PSK for modulation. If you use 16QAM, you can transmit a total of 4 bit per symbol, here the bit means the information bit and can be used as the bit we all know from computer science.
The last bit (pun intended) is not really important, since they mean nearly the same but bandwidth is actually not right.
I wanted to nerd out a bit here, don't take this too seriously.
@@Mefistofy I think it goes back to the old days when a flash website could take 20 seconds to load. Then increased bandwidth could kind of increase the loading speed of the page. But today 500 Mb isn't any faster than 1 Gb unless you are doing torrents or something, even then you are limited by how much traffic the servers will provide. Speed has become a misleading marking term that I despise seeing used in regards to anything technical. My other pet peeve is when someone uses a vector when they mean a scalar :)
His "joke" is that the speed of light (in fibre) has been "broken" by using microwave links, the radiation between which propagates at about the speed of light, whereas in fibre it is 2/3rds thereof, not half like he says.
The phase velocity of light in fibre is reduced, but the carrier (light) is so high frequency (100s THz) compared to microwave (GHz) that more bandwidth is possible, which makes the symbol rate in fibre higher.
Yes, he's oversimplified the terms too much. Microwave links have lower latency "lag", but also less bandwidth (mbps). "high speed trading" involves small amounts of information so you don't need much bandwidth, but latency is key.
The reason why it appeared the guy "broke the speed of light" was because he didn't disclose how his company was transferring data, only that they could do it faster than anyone else. Obviously the competition figured it out eventually.
This is a quality production! Amazing work!
There's a bit of improvements to be made about the sound modulation between music and voice in the video, but apart from that, the editing is extremely smooth and the documentary very enjoyable. I especially like the synthwave musical theme. Fascinating topic I did not even knew it existed, thanks a lot for sharing those shots and explanations, I'll be sure to follow you. As it seems others are doing it, here are my kind regards from France
This is wonderful and I'm glad to have come across this channel. Sidenote: people didn't say "streamed" during the 20th century, they would say "broadcast" or "live cast" also starting in the 1960s it became common for TV news to emphasize if something was "live via satellite"
Tom Scott never left, he transformed.
I’ve had one near me that I drive by SO often right next to an ATT building. I’ve wondered how it worked for years. Thank you.