In my experience a fully-centralised switch is actually quite uncommon.

In many locations they use light sensors, and if you live above a street oriented the right way you can see quite a cool effect of the lights going off sequentially down the street as the light goes below the threshold.

In other locations that I'm familiar with, they use a ripple relay, where a particular signal is transmitted over the power lines (a "ripple") in a way that doesn't affect unaware equipment, but signals the target equipment (relays on the supply to the streetlights) to switch. Similar technology is used to provide day/night rates where one circuit is only energised during off-peak hours.

I don't see any reason the ripple relay couldn't be bypassed to provide a second always-on feed for the Wi-Fi gear, but it might be that the ripple relays are not at every lamp post but instead at the substations or roadside cabinets, in which case there would indeed be some cost to run the extra circuits.

I previously worked at a company that made the light-controlled switches that control individual street lights. We shipped a lot of them, so I assume they are common. They are visiable and you can often spot them. They look like a plastic bulb on top of the light fixture.

At one point we came out with a slim line (low profile) design. When I asked why, they said that good ol' boys in Texas were riding in pickups and shooting the switches as a game. The low profile model was a harder target to hit. :-)

I am surprised Google was surprised, perhaps you were working with more modern infrastructure? Commercial areas?

I ran into this same problem in a the first 3 municipalities around 15 years ago when we tried deploying a street light solution.

> In my experience a fully-centralised switch is actually quite uncommon.

Just to offer a counter-point, in my experience it's often that they are managed in big groups, and individual control is uncommon.

Quite often at the right time you'll see big swathes of lights turning off, sections of neighbourhoods, as far as you can see down a reasonably straight road, etc.

From what I understand, it's usually just a timeswitch in the circuit breaker box at the side of the road.

Hard to say; it could be time control or ripple control of relays at substations, which would explain neighbourhoods turning on/off at the same time. It's still not fully centralised, and the more "decentralised" (I cringe when I write that word these days) it gets, the cheaper it gets to provide an always-on supply to the lamp post.

Thanks, that was quite an interesting read.

Google operated city-wide public WiFi in Mountain View for many years. So, it's not like they didn't have any experience.

I would also like to point out that most cities have a utility electrical grid to power traffic lights and the like. While I imaging some south cities could get away with solar-powered traffic lights, it's unlikely that Chicago is one.

I don't know anything about this Google+Chicago experience (even though I currently work at Google), but I would bet the issue was not as simple as "they found out that street lights turn off".

> Google operated city-wide public WiFi in Mountain View for many years. So, it's not like they didn't have any experience.

Google has been operating free WiFi in India at 400+ locations since 2016 and claim they've got a 8 million userbase [0].

> ...but I would bet the issue was not as simple as "they found out that street lights turn off".

I'd be very surprised if this was true. It seems more plausible to me that news.yc has anti-Google bias.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation...

Nope. News.yc individuals have biases, often quite strong. Some are very pro-Google, and some anti-Google. It depends on the time, the article, etc. Definitely goes both ways.

And how much bias you see depends on where you are on the spectrum. You naturally tend to see the unbiased opinion as closer to your own POV.

> It seems more plausible to me that news.yc has anti-Google bias.

It's surprising that you first speak about claims with very little proof and then continue to blatantly make one yourself.

I'm sorry it came of making a claim to a fact... but, really, my intention was to highlight that I'm more inclined to believe that news.yc has negative bias against Google (or at least in the context of this thread as the the comment voted to the top would indicate) than Google not doing their homework and shutting shop because they found during implementation that there was no electricity to power the access-points day-time because street lights (citation needed: I couldn't find any online reports supporting the claim made by the top comment. May be there's an offline public record of this?).

Ones in my neck of the woods just switch based on a light sensor on the top. No need for programming/timing adjustment or a master-switched second grid.

Streetlights in Berlin (at least on my street) are completely autonomous. It's a lot of fun to watch them start sequentially (with the light dimming down).

We have those too. One in a park near my house appears to have been programmed to perform a disco inferno sequence at twilight.

They should add some debouncer or something.

Maybe they did. We have street lights with light sensors, so they turn on when it's sufficiently dark rather than on a schedule.

I've seen videos of people who'd rather not have a light on outside their bedroom window at night setting up a laser pointer to point at the sensor to keep the light off.