I must have mentioned Millennium before, and that's why you mentioned this, right? Anyway, I once met Peter Tierney, who is now the president of Millennium, which has been renamed "Sphera."
At the time I was doing a feasibility study for using several existing cable routes for a brokerage client during the Eighties, and Peter T was the chief engineer of Western Union Advanced Transmission Services back then.
He and his patriarchal boss (a really great guy, plenty of character, an old world methodologist who had cable routes that were buried under the streets of NY committed to memory.. these cables were buried over fifty years ago) took me on a magical mystery tour of days gone by in their offices at 60 Hudson Street, before 60 Hudson Street was 60 Hudson Street as we now know it: the international transmission gateway office through which most of the voice and Internet traffic for the Western World flows.
We were exploring the prospect of pulling "out" a lead-sheathed twisted pair cable that had been used for telegraph services over the past sixty years, and using it as a drag line to pull "in" a fiber optic cable to Broad Street, across the street from the Stock Exchange. What can I tell you? The streets weren't being dug up so wrecklessly back then, and the cigar smoke was very thick in dem dare back rooms.
I guess I'm not addressing your principal reason for posting this message to my attention, am I? Millennium has created a vast urban optical network using Sycamore products in and around NY City. Someday I hope to visit their sites and learn more about how they've harnessed the new age. If Peter allows me to, I'll report what I find.
FAC |
