Flexible Fiber
Fiberoptic cable is a great way to move a large bandwidth. Verizon has been working to connect up to 18 million homes into its fiber network. Te catch is that fiber isn't all that flexible. Bending and flexing can completely kill the signals as
Fortune explains This intolerance for bending can make fiber optics a nightmare to install in someone's home. Snaking the wiring along the floorboards is out of the question - just one tight turn around the bookcase, and the signal is kaput. So Verizon's installers have been forced to come up with alternate routes, such as drilling holes in walls to get the cabling from one room to another. The process is time-consuming, expensive, and potentially destructive. The problem is particularly acute in apartment buildings - and there are a lot of those in Verizon's East Coast territory - which are full of conduits, shafts, and corners that must be navigated in order to hook up each customer. (In most single-family homes Verizon just needs to connect the fiber to a special box on the outside of the customer's house.) Fun fact: To get a fiber connection to a typical basement apartment, installers encounter an average of 12 right-angle turns.
But Corning seems to have some answers.
Corning's researchers figured out a way to keep the light going as it turns corners - lots and lots of corners. We can't go too deep into the technical details - the company exhibits CIA-levels of paranoia about its inventions. But essentially Corning's technology infuses the cladding that surrounds the fiber's narrow core with microscopic guardrails called nanostructures. They help keep the light from seeping out of the fiber, even when it is wound around a pencil - treatment that normally would render it completely useless.
Like many innovations at Corning, the discovery of "bend insensitive" fiber was a combination of serendipity and determination. A group of scientists from different disciplines - chemist Dana Bookbinder, chemical engineer Pushkar Tandon, and optical scientist Ming-Jun Li - had been thinking independently about nanostructures in their fields. Bookbinder, a sociable chap who says he spends a lot of his time "b.s.-ing" with other scientists, realized they needed to collaborate. They began brainstorming on Friday afternoons, and by the summer of 2004 they had started experimenting with nanostructures in fiber.
At first they conducted experiments on their own initiative, with Bookbinder rewarding his colleagues with homemade chocolates for coming in on weekends to help cook up early versions of the fiber. He also encountered skeptics. "We had several physicists who rolled their eyes and said, 'This will never work,'?" Bookbinder recalls.
Corning's business executives were less disbelieving, and as soon as they got wind of the project in early 2006, they put it on the fast track for development. They even shared early findings with Verizon, which loves the idea.
"When you see somebody tie a fiber cable in a knot and it is still able to transmit a signal, you initially think, 'There's something not right with that,'?" says Paul Lacouture, the Verizon executive who has led its FiOS buildout. Lacouture (who announced his retirement in late June) says the company also is considering wireless technologies that could help it deliver broadband in apartments, but for now Verizon's money is on Corning and its bendable fiber.
I hope us industrial guys don't have to wait too far behind the home applications. Our applications typically aren't as bandwidth hungry, but we sure could use some of that less delicate fiber!
Labels: Electronics, Networking
What’s Estonia?
Whether Al Gore made it or not, the internet maybe one of the only unadulterated pinnacles in America, right? Well according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) the US ranks 24th worldwide in “broadband penetration”. Right behind Estonia, the country to the west of Russia, yeah that’s the one. The OECD describes “broadband penetration” as the percentage of homes connected. However, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) measures this problem in a very peculiar way: as long as a single building in the ZIP code- a school, church, private business- has a broadband connection, then everyone in the area gets counted as having access. The FCC’s definition of “broadband” is a little iffy as well. Anything over 200 Kbps is considered to be “broadband”. Other parts of the world blaze through the web at speeds up to 10 times faster. Some say that the lack of competition is the real problem. With only two real companies offering cable and broadband connections: AT&T and Verizon, it’s no wonder Americans have grown complacent to paying $40/month for 4Mbps while in Japan they $30/month for 50Mbps. Yeah that’s right 50Mbps. Despite all of this overwhelming evidence that the US is lagging in the broadband area FCC chairman Kevin Martin stated, “I think our polices are a success”. So hats off to Estonia.
Labels: Computing, Networking
Nuclear Plant DataStorm
In August of last year
Unit 3 of the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama experienced a manual emergency shutdown (SCRAM). The Reactor got shut down there was no Radiation released and all the shutdown systems worked as they were supposed to.
so, what happened?
Apparently a ethernet connected PLC device generated what the investigative committee termed a "data storm":
The U.S. House of Representative's Committee on Homeland Security called this week for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to further investigate the cause of excessive network traffic that shut down an Alabama nuclear plant.
During the incident, which happened last August at Unit 3 of the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant, operators manually shut down the reactor after two water recirculation pumps failed. The recirculation pumps control the flow of water through the reactor, and thus the power output of boiling-water reactors (BWRs) like Browns Ferry Unit 3. An investigation into the failure found that the controllers for the pumps locked up following a spike in data traffic -- referred to as a "data storm" in the NRC notice -- on the power plant's internal control system network. The deluge of data was apparently caused by a separate malfunctioning control device, known as a programmable logic controller (PLC).
In other words PLC controller that had nothing directly to do with the valve controllers that caused the shutdown. The errant controller, was babbling or (in Government speak) causing a datastorm which in effect disabled the motorized valve controllers. What we don't know is the real cause of the babbeling PLC. Could it have been the PLC itself or caused by an external Denial of Service attack?
"Conversations between the Homeland Security Committee staff and the NRC representatives suggest that it is possible that this incident could have come from outside the plant," Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Subcommittee Chairman James R. Langevin (D-RI) stated in the letter. "Unless and until the cause of the excessive network load can be explained, there is no way for either the licensee (power company) or the NRC to know that this was not an external distributed denial-of-service attack."
The article continues to describe a couple of instances where Virrii and worms have contributed to major power shortages.
There are lessons to be learned from this one incident.
While IT administration and security issues often times can be perceived by us in the front lines a nuisance issues. Network security is critical when control issues are involved.
I find it interesting that no one has been able to nail down whether the PLC controller that brought the network down has a real harware issue or not. One time events are tough!!! It does sound like the problem though was most likely the PLC itself or some internal communications within the plant.
No digital contagion has been fingered in the latest incident, said Terry Johnson, spokesman for the Tennessee Valley Authority, the public power company that runs the Browns Ferry power plant.
"The integrated control system (ICS) network is not connected to the network outside the plant, but it is connected to a very large number of controllers and devices in the plant," Johnson said. "You can end up with a lot of information, and it appears to be more than it could handle."
The device responsible for flooding the network with data appears to be a programmable logic controller (PLC) connected to the plant's Ethernet network, according to an NRC information notice on the incident (PDF). The PLC controlled Unit 3's condensate demineralizer -- essentially a water softener for nuclear plants. The flood of data spewed out by the malfunctioning controller caused the variable frequency drive (VFD) controllers for the recirculation pumps to hang.
Such failures are common among PLC and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, because the manufacturers do not test the devices' handling of bad data, said Dale Peterson, CEO of industrial system security firm DigitalBond.
"What is happening in this marketplace is that vendors will build their own (network) stacks to make it cheaper," Peterson said. "And it works, but when (the device) gets anything that it didn't expect, it will gag."
In many cases, a simple vulnerability scan will even cause the devices to crash, Peterson said. During tests in an electrical substation, Nessus running in safe scan mode crashed devices, he said. In some cases, sending out broadcast data on the network will crash several of connected devices, he added.
"If you were to test any control systems that have any more than three or four (different) network-connected devices, they could be knocked over very easily," Peterson said.
Labels: Networking, Troubleshooting
Wireless advantages in Industry
Wireless technologies have been proven to be advantageous in several industries. According to
Automation World, companies have reported substantial savings by using wireless handheld devices. Maintenance productivity has been reported as being
twenty percent or better when handheld devices are used due to the reduction in paperwork. It saves time and money when technicians in the field can remotely retrieve information to help them do their jobs. Companies have also discovered that technicians in the field can use handheld devices to remotely download pertinent data or create work orders. This saves time versus having to write it down, and waiting for someone to enter the data or work order in the system. As the old saying goes, time is money.
British Petroleum projects a savings of $1 million per year by providing operators with handheld devices.
Mt. Olive Pickle Co. Inc. (MOP), the largest privately held pickle company in the U.S., has reported a savings of
$80,000 by using wireless voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) phones instead of upgrading their walkie-talkie based system.
Siemens Energy & Automation Inc., in Alphareta, GA, installed the wireless network for MOP. MOP also uses handheld devices from
Symbol Technologies in Holtsville, N.Y. Just by eliminating their paper-based work order system, MOP expects to save about $1 million over the next three years.
These are just a couple examples of companies that are saving time and money by incorporating handheld wireless technology. Several other companies around the world report substantial savings when using mobile devices.
Labels: Networking
