Google Comes to Windsor Park
As we were doing our daily walks through our Winsor Park neighborhood we began to notice a lot of extra paint lines in the yards and all along the streets plus the little yellow flags marking the natural gas lines. Soon the paint markings were surrounding our home as well. We came upon a crew painting the lines and inquired, they said it was for the future Google fiber. Well I have been documenting the weekly process as the fiber lines construction is occurring at a much faster pace than I expected.
Se we saw lots of White, Yellow, Blue and Green, Some red and orange but no Pink or Purple.
This is good news to us as the internet service in our neighborhood is not up to 2020+ standards for sure. It still relies on cable technology that has been in our neighborhood since Time Warner installed cable over 35 years ago. Since streaming services started we have divorced ourselves from cable TV and use an air antenna for local stations and stream the other stuff. So internet service is all we need. We started with Spectrum for just under$50 a month. This neighborhood has spotty service from Spectrum. Some locations in Windsor Park report excellent service. Our experience has been just the opposite with the service crashing several times a day. We had them come out and they ran new cable lines from the telephone pole all the way to the modem/router but the service improved to crashing only once every 24 hours. In our 7 years in Seattle I only had to reset the router 2 times. The real only other choice along our particular street is AT&T Fiber so I canceled the no contract Spectrum and gladly took the 1 year contract with AT&T for about $2 more monthly. The self connection was easy as the ATT fiber was already installed on our home. I later learned that it is fiber only from the main service line and past that point is still old cable technology. Doesn't matter it does not crash everyday and in the 3 months we have had it I have only had to reset the modem/router 1 time. The admiral read an article that said that all of the internet companies were waiting for someone else to come in and upgrade the lines for more dependable and faster service.
A good sign on the front door.
Soon a crew came along with a large hole drill, about the size of a jack hammer. I lost my pics and video of the crew but they were specifically marking the Gas lines so the trenching machine would not cut into the pipes. I am really sorry I failed to get a picture of the crew that was banging on the drill as it rotated with a hammer to prevent it from clogging up with asphalt as it cut the hole. I thought Wow, one of the most popular and advanced form of technology depends on a hammer!
This crew came through next. They remove the circular cap and use a high pressure sprayer to cut through the soil down to the gas pipe. They use a vacuum to suck out the debris, measure the depth to the gas line and and then place a temporary steel cover on the hole
This particular hole was 22" deep to the gas line
using high pressure water to cut through the soil.
After the dirt was vacuumed out they install the steel cover
The trenching machine was next at it cut a 2' wide and 12" deep trench, the hose vacuums up the debris from the trench.
Never saw the crew that came through and dug these holes and put a safety fence around on each property for what I am assuming to be a service box for each residence.
The guy driving the white truck has to be excellent at backing a trailer to follow the trenching machine for miles and miles.
The trench is smaller than I thought it would be, just enough for three fiber cables + orange 1.5" conduit for long range fiber cable. The trench cuts right along the curb which causes minimal disturbance of the asphalt, but when the trenching machine passes through an intersection you see several chunks of asphalt break up, they will become pot holes over time.
Within a couple of days the cable guys show up, they pull three strands of cable from smaller spools from the bed of the pickup and then the orange conduit is laid on top.
When I looked out this morning the Google Fiber had arrived.
The crew asked me if I needed out of my driveway, "Heck No, I just want to take some pictures for my blog."
So I asked these guys about the cable, Why were they laying 3 cables directly in the trench without going through the orange conduit? The orange conduit is only for the main line which is a long distance cable, the other cable are neighborhood, short distance cable.
He said there is about 5 miles of conduit per spool.
The orange wire that is installed alongside the conduit is a tracer line used for trouble shooting later.
You can see a thin white line coming out of the conduit used for fishing the main cable through the conduit. Has to be really strong stuff! I watched them splice two orange ends together here, they first tie the ends of the fishing line and then seal the two ends of the conduit together almost seamlessly.
Crew follows filling the trench with mortar.
Not a typical Concrete truck, This truck mixes the cement (front hopper), with the sand(rear hopper) and water as needed for the trench filling machine
Well this huge pile of cable was not there the next day, I assume it was pulled through.
The cement has dried in the trench.
About every three or four blocks is a huge service box buried in the ground.
So here is the junction or service box complete.
Then a Splicer shows up to splice the ends of the fiber cable.
He says he will be in the neighborhood two -three weeks, He just arrived from Denver where he was splicing Google Fiber cable there.
So he has all 6 ends of the 3 cables to splice fed into the splicing machine. He separates the individual fibers and splices them. It was over 90 degrees this day. I asked him if any other companies would be using these cables and he said no, Just Google unless some other arrangement is made in the future. So it seems that Google has found a way to exclude all others by not using the telephone poles and digging a private trench.
Another cable splicer stops to compare notes, He is informed that he needs to refer to some new diagrams on some website. He has also just arrived in Austin and the only vehicle that he could find for rent was a U-haul van which he got for two weeks at $200+ a day depending on mileage.
I wanted to ask more questions like "How do you make sure your always splicing the same 6 ends together at each junction box?" But I did not want to get in their way any longer. I can only assume there are unique identifying marks on each cable.
We have learned from our neighborhood Facebook page that after the Googler guys come through the neighborhood with their laptops to test the system we can then start to sign up for the service. But we have a year contract with ATT so our Google Speed will have to wait a few extra months.
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