Comment by duxup
2 years ago
I had a customer who used a line of sight system for extending their network across part of a city.
I had a shortcut on my desktop with the weather for that town ready when they would inevitably call and blame our unrelated equipment for some problem.
I worked at a small, local ISP in the 90:ies that had a point to point link across the river, handling the dial up traffic from the telecom company we partnered with.
Every few days, always at roughly the same time, all incoming dial up traffic would drop. A minute later, the customers could reconnect.
It took a while before we realized that one of the huge passenger ferries that docked a short distance upstream was the cause. When it arrived and departed, its chimneys and possibly bridge and highest deck blocked LOS across the river.
I used to work in high-frequency trading. I had several tabs permanently open to the live weather radar feed for regions where we had microwave towers: the NE USA, the South of England, the Alps...
I used to be in an adjacent field and we used to joke about when the HFT guys were gonna get working on some neutrino detectors & sources to signal straight through the Earth. You could use them for science on the weekends!
Sounds awesome, to be able to send a signal directly through the whole earth from point to point. It also sounds like origin story of X-Men or a new cancer
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Honestly I'm half-surprised no-one has tried this yet.
I'm curious to know where your towers were. Do you know if they still exist? Were your microwave antennae co-located on other operators' towers (e.g. those for VHF radio), or did your company have towers all to itself?
Without going into anything confidential - we had some of our own hardware, but generally rented capacity from firms like [0]. Some towers were custom built for HFT, some were shared with other types of users.
A famous blog post investigating some of the towers as an outsider, at [1], will be of interest to you.
If you want to guess where they are, get a globe, find the datacentres where electronic exchanges operate (it's not a secret: Chicago, New Jersey, London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Zurich...) and draw the straightest possible lines between pairs of them. Microwaves don't cross the ocean.
[0] https://www.mckay-brothers.com/
[1] https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/hft-in-my-ba...
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