Some of the best footage ever from Glencoe, courtesy of a bunch of extreme Frenchmen ... in action on the hill from 03:30 ... and in kilts at 09.50.

Loads of neat lines, wild weather, plenty of snow and heather, and a triumph of spirit (sometimes from a bottle).

[www.zapiks.fr]

Brilliant!

shedloads of bandwidth for what exactly? this isn't a backhaul for mobile comms it's for a few jpg's and some weather data, if you think an armoured cable lying on rocks where it can be trod on is more resilient than a wireless setup you are probably a project manager or sales person...doubt you work in IT and use fibre much.



you dont need a straight line of sight you can have a repeater or 2/3/4 whatever it needs, there's reliable (99.9% uptime) wifi in much more hostile places than Glencoe, the technology isn't the issue!

Good find David. Enjoyed that video very much. Looks like they made the best of it... as do most others round these parts.

There are no locations on the Ski Area with line of sight to the base and no options with available power for an indirect route using ski area property. It would require access to a much more distant site/building that increases the required radio link length, thus equipment/antenna cost and number of hops and thus opportunities for failure.

Fibre requires nothing intermediate, is immune to electrical and RF interference, is corrosion free and not affected by water ingress to the cable and the hardware is cheap, simple and reliable.

Expensive specalised and supposedly rugged wireless kit was tried in 2008 or 2009 under the previous ownership between the top of the Access and Rescue Station and it was shot by winter 2010.



Someone standing on a armoured cable is not going to affect it. Last weekend a section of the cable was washed into the mountain river. Where it was pummelled by moving rocks there are scars to the casing but the armour was not breached. What appears to have broken it was that the river was so high the cable was thrashed against the serrated metal deck of the mountain bike track bridge which acted as a hack saw!

Ok Alan, if you say so, but other people manage to provide 50v @ 50w from a battery & the sun just fine. I don't imagine you need more than 1 repeater on the access chair which must be the only location without this fabled power




Are you really saying there is no kit that can handle the weather of Glencoe, really?? or just that 7 years ago some cheapskates tried some crap equipment.



Do you have an uptime meter for your cams

why is there not a centre cable up the access chair towers where power/fibre could be run easily and safely, is there some technical reason

Carrying power on lift towers is not permitted here. A comms cable up the centre of the lift towers would present an icing problem and chairs would get entangled in it with an all round bad outcome.

The cable would hardly be any more susceptible to icing than if it were on the ground, I have no idea how chairs would get entangled in it, I am talking about it running up the middle of the rope pylon to pylon like on many other installs, if the chairs were near to tangling with it there would be a lot more to worry about than a fibre cable, there is no way there would be a bad outcome unless you were really stupid

I was in Courchevel last week, and I noticed that they have chairs carrying power lines. I remember going up one and thinking I thought these where not allowed.

Hum, looks like a bit of burial or better tie down is required. I would ignore him, he clearly has not the faintest clue about networking. As anyone in the know about networking knows fibre is the gold standard for all backhaul networking without exception. Anything else is a kludge because you where too cheap to lay the fibre.

Because short of being sawn in half be a metal mountain bike track, single mode fibre scales from 10Mbps to at least 100Gbps. That is single mode fibre you installed 20 years ago for 10BaseFL could be used today for 100Gbps. So maybe they took the long term view and thought lets make a sensible investment in fibre now which could easily last 50 years and down the road when the backhaul from the resort is sorted we could offer our clients WiFi on the mountain.

Your comments about fibre optic cable are clearly coming from a position of deep ignorance about the technology and just make you look extremely stupid to those in the know. Wireless backhaul sucks, has always sucked and will always suck.

Deep ignorance Lol
You are tripping, I never said fibre wasn't any good for moving data I said it wasn't suited for the crappy install lying on the ground up a mountain, no one on earth would spec that for you unless they wanted cheap and unreliable, I think all this does is show how little you know about the tech especially if you think all wireless sucks, were not talking about using a few sky routers bridged together here, just go ask ceragon about their crappy wireless backhaul kit that Telco's who don't know what they are doing use, your knowledge appears to be stuck in the 90's.

I clearly asked why there isn't a cable running in a safe location up the middle pylons, run a fibre line there and great job done but that hasn't happened and doesn't appear to be happening although you have a nice big drum of it you claim why not get up there and sort them out.

Once again jabuzzard to be clear, fibre or wifi both are fine but either needs to be implemented correctly

You'll notice that none of the lifts in Scotland carry their derailment cabling on overhead wires because of icing issues. Far worse in these montains than the dry air of the Alps.

Wind and solar powered webcams are just about viable at the English clubs with regular ice clearing but the climate at altitude in the Highlands will simply not tolerate it.

There are really good reasons why the existing infrastructure is set up as it is.

you get military spec fibre that works down to -70 so icing isn't an issue for the data, could it cause other safety issues to the actual tow having a cable up the middle? I cant think how it would but you may actually know and I would like the verification.

I think only 1 relay would be needed to make line of sight and that would be half or two thirds up the chair and not in the worst place weather wise certainly not for icing, it's really not much power to generate and store, I am only trying to offer alternatives, people with closed minds on how things are or were done are tiresome.

I don't have any issues with fibre of course it's great at what it does and if installed well it will last a long time, I don't consider it lying on the ground running up the mountain as a good install though.

Also is there no other power at all on these towers? I see junction boxes on a lot of them is that just for the derailment wiring, I really didn't think getting power half way up the access chair would be so difficult being it's there at the top and bottom



Edited 1 times. Last edit at 13.26hrs Fri 13 Mar 15 by geeo.