Saturday, September 07, 2013
Misadventures in asset management
This is a BT street cabinet on Townley Road, East Dulwich. It's been open at least five days. Luckily, it appears that the copper thieves we hear so much about haven't ravaged it yet. It's on a stretch of pavement that sees a lot of traffic from school kids, so it's sort of surprising that a curious child, or one with vandalous tendencies, hasn't yanked out a fistful of phone lines. There's a VDSL cabinet a few metres away, so I'm guessing the engineer did some provisioning and forgot to lock up.
Makes me wonder why the M2M brigade haven't created a simple GSM-enabled device with a light meter, which could report hourly. Three consecutive hourly reports of ambient light above a certain threshold could generate a flag to alert the asset management team that the cabinet is most likely open, and a truck roll could be organised.
Another approach could be crowdsourcing. Find two or three dependable people in each urban postcode to walk a designated route covering a number of cabinets every day or so, and report problems, in exchange for free service. Like a kind of broadband neighbourhood watch.
Or just set up a Twitter account, like @OpenBTcabinets.
That is, if anyone cares...