[BC] Radio Is Not what it Used to be

[Bill Sepmeier]

>Radio is not as fun now as it once was. For me, one reason is that all of 
>the
>equipment that's my responsibility is scattered all around northern 
>Illinois.
>It is not at all uncommon that I have to drive 140 miles round trip to push 
>a
>button. Now to me, this is not fun and it happens more times than I would
>prefer.

Ok, so why don't we, the engineering community who maintains everything 
everywhere, INSIST that manufacturers develop a TCP/IP - based standard 
interface for EVERY single piece of gear made, so that we can operate and 
troubleshoot EVERYTHING in ANY plant, ANYWHERE on Earth from our desks?

I was after all of the satellite equipment manufacturers I used to work with 
to do this back in 1996. We made a system to monitor all of our 
international ISP clients ourselves back then, since the gear used by ISP 
obviously was set up to work over the 'net ... but the VSAT gear and other 
not-ISP related equipment was still only giving us RS-232 serial 
non-addressed access.  There is NO reason an IP port can't be stuck in 
anyting today, and there's no reason a standard "virtual rack" similar to 
what we had at the old National Supervisory Network to run transmitters and 
EBS couldn't be implemented as well.  With consolidation and today's energy 
costs, to run around actually looking at stuff is ... silly!

Seems to me there's a business here (but then again, I did this business 
once,with VSATs and  X.25 low speed data, back in the 80's!)  ...

Now that DSL high-speed 'net and IP are literally everywhere, why can't we 
get this done as an industry?  Set a standard for the "backbone," a nice GUI 
"virtual rack" system with drivers and GUI templates provided by the 
manufacturers.   As you add gear that would be supplied with stock IP ports 
that couldbe assigned static IP addresses on a corporate intranet or be 
served by a simple firewall router to gate everything to the regular 'net if 
there's no intranet in place you could set up a "virtual rack command/ 
monitor/control GUI" for each location you're responsible for.   Then you 
could monitor / run EVERYTHING from your laptop on your desk at home (or 
office, obviously).

That anyone has to drive anywhere to do anything like 'pressing a button' 
really makes no sense given the level of internetworking technology out 
there on the shelf today.  We engineer-types should refuse to buy new gear 
unless it can operate remotely - and in an integrated, standardized fashion. 
  No IP port?  No GUI drivers / software that will plug into a "virtual 
rack" standard?  No standard?   No sale.

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