Wet Country Wireless; How British Weather Killed a Billion Pound Tech Company | Hacker News Reader

Wet Country Wireless; How British Weather Killed a Billion Pound Tech Company

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I used to work in that Ionica building (after Ionica left). Like Ionica, the building design was cutting edge but didn’t live up to expectations! The ‘smart’ building used computer controlled cooling towers, vents and a giant block of concrete (as a ‘thermal battery’) to manage the heating and cooling, in place of regular air conditioning. The building ran on an ancient OS/2 desktop computer - I wonder if it is still functioning?

But the system didn’t work very well at all - in winter, it was freezing cold, and in summer it got too hot. Ironically, you could open the windows by your desk to get a cooling fresh breeze of air, but then the building manager would come around and complain that you had to shut the windows, they were disrupting the ‘smart ventilation’ airflow!

My office has a similar system but in a very simple version. It's just for cooling and constantly pulling air out of the basement into the offices. For a few weeks in the beginning of summer it's working fine but after the basement heats up, it's just shuffling hot air around until the building manager remembers to shut it down. The old building manager was quite good at turning it on at night and off by day to cool the building in summer nights.

I remember reading somewhere that this system had been built again in Germany by a larger corporation that issued a PR statement about that but I cannot find it anywhere.

I worked in Munich, Germany in a building that had this. It was built some time around 2010. Same experience as you had. It didn’t really work all that well. Spring early summer was good. Peak summer was a disaster.

Opening the window would make me happy, even once in awhile. I understand it’s not feasible in most buildings.

(The thought of going back to closed up modern building is sickening lately. I know it’s coming for myself though.)

Yeah, I feel the same way.

On the one side, I get it: air-conditioned buildings, railway cars etc. must have solid windows so that the system works.

But it does not work emotionally for the humans trapped within. Opening a window and feeling the rush of fresh wind against your face is an important feeling, we are creatures of the vast outdoors by ancient heritage, not cave dwellers.

In Silmarillion, Tolkien wrote that even the High Elves of Valinor need to feel the fresh air of the outer lands from time to time. I would say that this extends to us mortals too.

I have a hunch, though, that often the problem is not emotional but actually physiological. If a ventilation system works well enough that air is not altogether too stale or humid or high in CO2, but not well enough to ensure the air is properly fresh, you could easily start feeling like there's something off, without being able to pinpoint exactly what's wrong. Most office ventilation systems have very few sensors and don't respond to changes in occupancy, or are otherwise hard to regulate, which can easily lead to air quality that is good-enough-but-not-quite-there and a desire to open a window. I've worked in offices that were stuffy all the time, but also in offices that were pleasant winter and summer, and nobody ever complained that the windows didn't open.

That can definitely be. We are absolutely dependent on air, so our air quality sensors are likely to be fairly sensitive.

Unless it's carbon monoxide poisoning...

We're in a pandemic and even now people seem to have a hard time opening windows in northern parts of Europe.

Really

Durchzug mördet!

You got it /s

I worked there for a while too! Zeus technology, the subsequent tenant. Very expensive. The ionica sign was still lying in the bushes behind the generator outbuilding.

An additional problem with opening the window was the smell from the nearby sewage farm on some days.

I shudder to think what a "sewage farm" is, but I imagine it is something mundane that just happens to have a name that makes Americans think, "why on Earth would you farm sewage?"

Gotta have a lot of euphemisms for your sewage treatment plant. Apparently they now call it a "water recycling centre"

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ionica/@52.2330937,0.15565...

My guess is a sewage treatment plant? Many of those have parts exposed to the air and don't smell nice.

> Ironically, you could open the windows by your desk to get a cooling fresh breeze of air, but then the building manager would come around and complain that you had to shut the windows, they were disrupting the ‘smart ventilation’ airflow!

-At a building I used to work in, management solved that problem by having a contractor bolt all the windows shut so that the ventilation could do its thing.

Only problem was, the ventilation still didn't work, but now we couldn't open the windows.

Sigh.

> bolt all the windows shut

Pretty sure this is a fire code violation in many places

Oh, the building was up to code as we had (at least) two routes from any office space to the outside in an emergency.

It sounds like that scene from the HHGTTG, only in real life :-/

The new Toronto streetcars have AC, replacing the 60s era streetcars.

Now the windows don’t open. Maybe that’s fine for temperature control, but there can be many good reasons to have open windows on public transit.

The reason is the city is loud enough and after a hard day of work you don't want to jump on the streetcar to hear the deafening of the city because someone wants the window open.

The other reason is someone will open the window but not close it and when the AC turns on all the cold air just goes out the window.

My comment is more about smells getting stuck inside.

Aircraft, trains and other vehicles have all tried to emphasize how well they filter recirculated air, but it’s not going to win against an open window in a moving vehicle for airflow.

this is analogous to software where it is like imposing a solution, which obviously doesn't work, because the management has spent some money on it :)

> ‘smart ventilation’ airflow

I've lived and worked in buildings where airflow was crazy.

You know, you open a door and it goes flying out of your grasp and you have to use your weight to help close the door.

Or doors that would stubbornly refuse to open, fighting suction the first couple inches before the forces would ease up and the door could be opened by mortals.

I lived in one apartment on the top floor, and in winter there was some weird effect where I had to leave the heat on with no fan and warm air would fill the room by convection. If the fan was on, it would quickly become 80 degrees no matter what.

I know we call these “smart” buildings but in actuality, they are quite dumb. Any kind of building is a technological phenomenon and good engineering is simple. A smart building is one designed to solve climate control problems without requiring complex computer systems. Many indigenous structures around the world were built this way.

HVAC solves climate control. By that measuring stick, I have been routinely disappointed by indigenous structures that claim to have solved climate control but should more accurately be described as "somewhat mitigating the worst of it at enormous cost to the builder, maintainer, and/or operator." They have a lot more in common with the poorly functioning "thermal battery" than with modern HVAC, which is boring, cheap (by comparison), reliable, flexible, and doesn't even require computers -- a bimetallic strip will do, if you must.

> HVAC solves climate control

At a huge energy cost, because we insist on brute-forcing comfortable climates in cookie-cutter buildings, instead of learning from vernacular/indigenous architecture and using modern technology to augment on top of that.

The real crying shame is that air conditioning units could be used as heat pumps (which can be extremely efficient) with just a few added parts, but hardly anyone does that.

I looked into it, but the added cost isn't really worth the effort where I live. They have such a narrow effective temperature range that it would hardly see any use as such.

I'm getting Hitchhiker's Guide vibes from this (Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454). I had no idea the book was this close to reality :-)

> a giant block of concrete (as a ‘thermal battery’) to manage the heating and cooling

Can you explain how this worked? Or how it was supposed to work? Was it just a literal block of solid concrete? I’m so intrigued and I have so many questions!

Thermal insulators (air) conduct heat poorly. Thermal conductors (metal) transfer hear rapidly, but "hold" onto limited amounts. Thermal batteries (concrete, earth, water, marble) balance heat storage and transference.

Geothermal systems use the ground as a sort of battery- drawing heat in winter, dumping it in summer.

Smart designs will use concrete floors in front of windows to store and release heat from the sun in winter (and rely on overhangs to keep sun out in summer).

Presumably, the concrete foundation (or a really big block) could serve a similar purpose with a hydronic system transferring heat in and out of the block to and from radiators in the rest of the building.

During summer months, run water from the radiators through an evaporative cooling system, to the concrete block, back to radiators. The concrete will cool down when the evaporative system is at peak efficiency, and siphon heat off when it is not.

During winter, instead of going through evaporative cooling, the water could ve pumped through solar heating panels to the same effect- the concrete warms on sunny days, storing excess heat, and bleeds it back to the water on cloudier days.

As you can imagine, the system would be very difficult to get correctly sized for a commercial building, and require backup heating and cooling for anything but temperate weather.

If you've never been in a place intentionally built like this, chances are you've still experienced the effect in the shape of a brick house. Especially in the spring, when the sun is strong but before it's warm, it'll sometimes be enough to cover most or all of overnight heating requirements.

Alas, where I live, tornados are more common than brick houses are (though not nearly as common as some places).

Then again, at the rate lumber is increasing in price, maybe brick will start becoming feasible again...

Interesting! TIL, thanks for the explanation!

Was expecting to read about Rabbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(telecommunications) which was another failed wireless communication venture and think DECT roaming for a quick grasp of what they offered.

Can't say I had heard of the company in the article, though living inside the M25, you are kind of bubbled from internet offering choice limitations.

Ah, Rabbit was amazing. A “mobile” you could use within a few feet of specific locations.

As for Ionica, it wasn’t that long ago that you would still see the dishes on roofs and chimneys in the Midlands. Its downfall, though, was less to do with rain and more that it was narrowband, so good only for voice and maybe dialup modem, at a time when cable networks were not far off launching DOCSIS broadband.

I know someone who still uses the Rabbit handset as their home phone.

There was also Dolphin Telecom, the network based on Tetra technology and was only in service for 2-3 years.

Warning: long-winded story with catchy title which is misleading. The only reference to weather is that the service was "dropping out during wet weather." No further explanation is provided. They also cite another problem due to "tree foliage", but this has nothing to do with weather.

both contain water.

"contains water" wouldn't normally be enough to suggest something is weather, but this is Britain so it's actually a reasonable comment.

PtMP 3.5 or 3.65 services should never be implemented with non line of sight, or through trees. In a typical TDD airtime system, no matter what it is, one client out of twenty on an AP radio with poor signal (let's say, -77 on both chains) will consume more air time and drag down the performance of the entire AP. There's a reason why all the deployment guides for modern WISP PTMP radios are quite insistent on true clear fresnel zone between CPE radio and AP.

But if I had a dollar for every shoddy 802.16d-2004 or 802.16e based WISP trying to shoot through thick foliage or even install CPEs inside peoples' windows....

I think the other issue is that demand increases the most when it’s raining, just when supply is the lowest, further crushing any weak systems.

From a last mile 3.5, 3.65 and 5.x GHz band WISP perspective, wet weather isn't what killed that, but overall better radios from the competition, for PtMP access to AP radios:

ubiquiti (rocket M5 and 5ac, and associated family of radios)

cambium pm450 and cambium's 802.11n and ac based radios

mikrotik radios

various telrad, radwin and other vendors' 802.16e based stuff (now obsolete, but wasn't quite so in 2015)

those ionica things are so weird, rare, were manufactured in very low volumes and cost way too much. these devices are from a much earlier era, around the same time as the cambium (motorola) FSK100 series PMP radios. they never achieved any significant market penetration in the global low-budget WISP equipment market.

Sonofon (now Telenor) in Denmark had a similar issue using FWA for internet service. Internet would drop out in the rain, the signal couldn’t parse over small stretches of water and leafs would get in the way in the spring and summer time.

The stupid part is that people had already been asking if water droplets would’t be an idea, and technicians working on the test equipment had noticed that it wouldn’t work in the rain.

We were on FWA for a while, as it was the only connection type faster than ISDN available to us, before DSL was fully rolled out.

My dad was an RF technician, so he checked all the permits and allocations beforehand, and did his own survey to make sure we had a 100% uninterrupted line of sight to the mast.

It worked quite well, better than the horror stories you hear now, 1.5Mbps and we didn't have issues with rain unless it was a torrential downpour. Snowfall was the real killer, in our experience. I guess most other subscribers weren't so lucky with foliage etc.

In the end, DSL was rolled out and we jumped ship, but FWA was a neat technology, it felt very futuristic.

This was one of my very first shareholdings. I worked for Nortel who made the kit, and I remember an excited presentation in the staff canteen where the upcoming ISDN capabilities of the system were described.

I learned from that experience...

My country switched to cable in the 1980s. Its always fascinating to me seeing old pictures where every house has an antenna!

Wireless technology can be rolled out quickly while fibreglass networks are a massive and costly undertaking. Neatly putting all infrastructure into the ground is certainly more aesthetically pleasing IMO.

The UK did have a cabled system at the time - this is about moving from cables to wireless, for better bandwidth and lower infrastructure costs. (Obviously it didn't work out.)

In Sweden that sector died as the fiber network was extended. It did fill a niche that shrank as fiber was laid down.

Understandable but looking at current progress, I seriously doubt the UK will have significant fiber roll-out within this century.

I lived in Cambridge, UK in the 1990s and after moving house in the second half of 1996 we had Ionica service installed.

I moved out of that property a year later, wonder what happened to the hardware...

If rain attenuation was a significant issue for Ionica, then won't it be a significant issue for the UK's 5G roll-out? Both system appear to run at about 3.5GHz.

5G is designed to drop down frequencies in situations like that. The frequency range that 5G can use is huge, but speeds won't be as fast lower down the spectrum.

That patch antenna array looks both beautiful and a pain in the ass to design and simulate.

> That patch antenna array looks both beautiful and a pain in the ass to design and simulate.

These days, it isn't too hard. You can usually just import your antenna design CAD file into the simulation tool, and go from there. Set the material properties, thickness of the PCB and its composition, and such.

I wonder what he meant by "lingering signs of bt monopoly". Only they and i think Virgin actually supply lines. And the price for a landline is absurd. Like completely out of touch with reality. We have to pay extra for basics like caller id and even to call uk mobile phone numbers! Which is totally ridiculous. Landlines have a quarter of the utility and cost 7 times more (easily) then a call/text only mobile plan.

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