"Oh yeah, hang a hard drive off the pole in my neighborhood. That'll last the entire winter." They're not at the network edge, but any cable company interested in provisioning real telephone service has or will build out power kiosks in public right of way every 3/4 mile of trunk line or so. The half-way decent ones have many "truck batteries" and include a Onan (or other brand) natural gas generator in a half-underground concrete pad. After almost a decade of walking by one, I was able to see inside a few weeks back. The guy working on it, in response to my inquiry, said "that's the first time in all the years I've been working on these things that somebody walked up and correctly identified what these things are." He was working on an air filter. There was plentyof gear in the kiosk, but room for a few hundred harddrives, largely removed from the weather. Spinning hard drives are kinda warm. My WAG is that several thousand homes are served by a power kiosk in the Cox Cable network, and they have hundreds of these in their franchise area. Of course, when one thinks of integrating the harddrives into the network topology, one shudders. The aerial cable was actually across the street - the parkway was almost non-existent on that side of the street. John Willkie ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.