Outside Plant Design – Episode 0

Outside plant cabling has always been considered the unwanted step child of communications cabling. But, with the coming of 5G, outside plant will need to grow to support the increase in antenna sites as well as provide support for increasing data requirements.

For the next few months, I'll be writing blog posts on various areas of outside plant design and construction. But, I'm going to approach this topic in a slightly different manner.

I've been following synthetic speech for a number of years, but never really cared for it. It was just too machine like which made it very difficult to listen to for any amount of time. Recently, though, I've seen some major improvements in the technology and thought I'd give it a try. It's still a lot of work for me, but the result is pretty good in my opinion.

So, for this series of blog posts, I'll be using text to speech software to deliver the audio stream. From week to week, I'll tweak the settings to see how lifelike I can make it and will welcome your input on the subject. All I ask is that you give it a fair shake and listen to the entire series. And if you don't like it, you can always read the text.

But, why am I doing this. Is this just another novel idea to do something different. Actually, no. For anyone who works in distance learning, this can be a real game changer. I'll give you an example.

What if I had spent the last six months developing an online audio course that minutely examined all of the hues of blue in the sky and their origins. Then just as I upload it I see that a research team from Siberia has found that we're all wrong and the colors are actually variations of green. If I had done the voice over for my course, this would mean that I would have to re record the entire course just to change the words, blue to green. But, if I had used text to speech software, I could simply perform a global search in my document, change blue to green and then reproduce the course. And this would take a fraction of the time it would take to re record.

So, for our first episode next week, I'm going to talk about route design in outside plant. Here is a short excerpt from it.

Listen on audio stream.

See you next week....and thanks for listening.