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Comment by timthorn | Hacker News Reader

Not mentioned is the fact that the BT Tower was designed to be a node in the microwave backbone network. There are landmark towers across the country, though no others are also restaurants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Telecom_microwave_netw...

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"For example, the Tower’s microwave aerials were removed more than a decade ago, as they were no longer needed to carry telecommunications traffic from London to the rest of the country."

It might not go into details, but it does mention it.

To me it's surprising they didn't keep them for backup / resiliency. There's a lot of rats and mice in London, and they can and do chew through fibre.

I think it's just that the bandwidth of the microwaves is not much by today's standards. It was capable of 150,000 simultaneous telephone calls, which is something like 10Gbs. It may be that modern numbers were higher, but possibly not much as you have to share the microwave spectrum with other uses. In a fibre you get the whole optical spectrum to yourself, so you can achieve much higher speeds. You can also run many fibres in the same ducting and increase bandwidth that way.

For backup / resiliency you just run more fibres via different routes.

We don't do backup or resiliency anymore in search of "value for money"

Fitzrovia is laced with fibre; the entire area is/was host to a large number of broadcast service providers, media companies, telcos, etc.

Running out of fibre is not likely in that part of London.

I wonder how many of them were originally set up there because of proximity to the tower and its communications links. Other than that, isn't Fitzrovia basically UCL and early 20th century novelists? Although I suppose there is Broadcasting House over on the other side.

From memory at the time there was corrosion on the fixings and it would've been exceedingly expensive to repair/replace.

Maintaining redundant fibre links (which exist) would likely be cheaper than maintaining a decades-old microwave system (I would wonder if they even have the appropriate spectrum licenses anymore, anyway).

Cheaper to replace fiber during the day when most of the customers are out, than to hire a rare specialized technician to maintain it maybe

I feel like my memory (and that article) aren’t very clear on this, but Backbone in spirit felt quite different to the series of high bandwidth towers of which Telecom Tower was one part.

Regular lets-call-grandma telecommunications would be handled by your well know, friendly, cuddly round towers like Telecom Tower and Stokenchurch just next to the Chiltern cutting on the M40.

Sinister everyone-has-died communications would be handled by the mysterious, dangerous looking towers like Highgate and Kelvedon Hatch. These towers resemble high tension power lines and growl at you if you look at them for too long.

This site has a lot more detail on how the two ended up as one, over the years:

https://www.subbrit.org.uk/features/backbone-microwave-relay...

I've not plotted it myself, but I'm told that if you plot the links to other main microwave nodes, and then look at embassies from foreign nations....

Did HM government allow the foreign nations to choose the individual locations of their embassies?

Revolving restaurants! It's a fantastic place to eat, the sad thing has been that BT just couldn't exploit the value of it in terms of corporate entertainment. I think it'll be lovely for people to be able to have a meal up there.

Most of them were along the ECML and WCML, you could see them in several spots from a train ride.

They were not big enough to contain a restaurant, just two big dishes on top of a pole, on top of a hill.

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