Chile Forum

Atlantis wrote:I wonder how much this will push the vote for the building of the mega dams in the south.

It was power from the south as I understand it that caused the blackout. It was a central distribution station in the Bio-bio region that took out the whole grid. How about wave power? There does not seem to be shortage of that recently.

From the bloomberg article:

Pinera said he plans to rewrite the 2010 budget to free resources for a reconstruction fund. Chile has $11.3 billion invested overseas in an economic stabilization fund that the government can use to finance a budget deficit.

How many countries in the World have that on tap these days?

Here's official info (in English!) on the ESSF:
http://www.minhda.cl/english/fondos_sob ... _valor.php

Probably the best-managed commodity-driven economy in the world from a financial perspective. There's no public debt, a characteristic shared with only a few oil-flush states or tiny ones. We avoided the worst of Dutch Disease, but alas, there's also been a marked slowdown in diversification away from mining either the last 20 years (as a share of exports or GDP, copper dropped in the 70s/80s but no longer since then, lately not helped by high copper prices). I have a hard time understanding why copper needs to be shipped to China to be wrapped in plastic into an Ethernet cable before it's shipped back to Chile. At the very least, there should be more added value on top of copper.

admin wrote:

Atlantis wrote:I wonder how much this will push the vote for the building of the mega dams in the south.

It was power from the south as I understand it that caused the blackout. It was a central distribution station in the Bio-bio region that took out the whole grid. How about wave power? There does not seem to be shortage of that recently.

Well, I think it would make more sense to better use what's available before building new power generators. Power use in Santiago is hugely inefficient, insulation and building standards have been talked to death in this forum. And you never know, your hydroelectric dam down there might suddenly develop a drain

I checked out the website for the SIC, https://www.cdec-sic.cl/index_en.php... actually very informative, and I know from a family friend who used to work for Endesa as a technical lead in maintenance for Endesa that they're pretty well run, and in fact I haven't experienced very many power cuts in my time in Chile. Considering that most of the power lines are above ground it's not bad.

The thing that gets me is that the mobile networks were out again.. that shouldn't happen. As I mentioned in another thread somewhere, the radio base stations have battery backups that will keep them going for several days, and the core network should have duplicate units and communications, as well as generator backup. In fact, in an emergency the network operator or their suppliers can override licensing limitations and allow use of the complete hardware capabilities, so the actual capacity in an emergency should be far in excess of the normal use. Someone has been "chamullando-ing" the consumers and possibly the regulator here, well designed mobile network shouldn't go down like that, and according to a Mexican friend who worked for Alcatel during a major earthquake up there, and saw "his" network survive in spite of the network operator's buildings collapsing... don't...

For what it's worth, our VTR triple service was almost rock solid once the power came up, but we're a long way North of the earthquake. I think my parents said they weren't able to phone us first time from the UK, but I talked to them within a day or so using the VTR phone service (and before that by email). Of course the disadvantage is that when the power is out, the cable modem's battery dies after a few hours.

James.

Stoph wrote:No black out in Antofagasta

That's why you pay so much for your electricity up there .

I bet the number of guys in Chile with advanced cell phone networking architecture qualifications (including real world experience) numbers are less than a 100. I am not talking about guys trained to plug some wires in at a quick N-o-k-i-a training seminar, but guys qualified to design cell grid infrastructure on a national level. Most of that high level stuff like that is just airdropped prepackaged units by foreign companies, and then some guys here get a bit of training on how to maintain it from some foreign consultant.

The whole communication outage smells like someone cut corners that did not understand what sort of corners they were cutting, and the handful of guys that could fix it where more than just a little bit busy with over half the country down at one time. Still, considering the nature of the collapse, they did manage to bring it up in fairly good order. Just it would have stopped a lot of other problems had it come up sooner.

I am not aware of single computer science department or engineering department in this country that is cranking sufficiently high caliber people in sufficient volume to come anywhere near to handling what this country needs. Most computer science majors in Chile are lucky if they can program a computer (sorry making web pages does not count), and the word engineer it thrown around so loosely who knows what anyone is really qualified to do.

Eduction system, R&D, I am repeating myself too frequently....

FrankPintor wrote:... in an emergency the network operator or their suppliers can override licensing limitations and allow use of the complete hardware capabilities

Sigh... There are too many companies wanting you to pay them not to disable something the device you "bought" can already do... If that's not bad, antisocial business, I really don't know what is.

James.

I'm not usually a fan of PTB edited Wikipedia but FYI:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection wrote:CME events, along with solar flares, can disrupt radio transmissions, cause power outages (blackouts), and cause damage to satellites and electrical transmission lines.

jehturner wrote:

Stoph wrote:No black out in Antofagasta

That's why you pay so much for your electricity up there .

doesn't mean we don't get power outages. We have them often I have been told.

admin wrote:I bet the number of guys in Chile with advanced cell phone networking architecture qualifications (including real world experience) numbers are less than a 100. I am not talking about guys trained to plug some wires in at a quick N-o-k-i-a training seminar, but guys qualified to design cell grid infrastructure on a national level. Most of that high level stuff like that is just airdropped prepackaged units by foreign companies, and then some guys here get a bit of training on how to maintain it from some foreign consultant.

The whole communication outage smells like someone cut corners that did not understand what sort of corners they were cutting, and the handful of guys that could fix it where more than just a little bit busy with over half the country down at one time. Still, considering the nature of the collapse, they did manage to bring it up in fairly good order. Just it would have stopped a lot of other problems had it come up sooner.

With you all the way on this, and your numbers are about right, I figure about 30 engineers per network to handle the radio part. I'm one of the foreign consultants just not in Chile unfortunately... technology transfer is part of the package, and it works out OK when the customer engineers show some initiative and interest, but they often don't as they're too comfortable with their old knowledge. It's not that difficult to get right, just needs some understanding, reviewing the performance of the networks, and a little bit of contingency planning.

The networks employ a lot more people than that of course, but it's mostly billing, databases, marketing, gateways to TV shows, roaming and other high level stuff. They have nothing to do with optimizing or troubleshooting the networks.

admin wrote:I am not aware of single computer science department or engineering department in this country that is cranking sufficiently high caliber people in sufficient volume to come anywhere near to handling what this country needs. Most computer science majors in Chile are lucky if they can program a computer (sorry making web pages does not count), and the word engineer it thrown around so loosely who knows what anyone is really qualified to do.

Eduction system, R&D, I am repeating myself too frequently....

We can form a chorus I'm still working out what an "ingeniero comercial" does

jehturner wrote:There are too many companies wanting you to pay them not to disable something the device you "bought" can already do... If that's not bad, antisocial business, I really don't know what is.

I don't really get this... the customer specifies what he wants, the infrastructure supplier delivers off the shelf parts which can do quite a bit more, and enough licenses so the customer gets what he ordered. Everyone is happy: the customer got what he ordered, and has an upgrade path if his business is more successful than expected, and the supplier is happy to have economies of scale on his off the shelf parts and a possibly captive customer. And as a bonus, in an emergency, the licenses can be overridden to use the maximum capacity allowed by the hardware. In fact, any emergency call you make on a mobile network does exactly that.

FrankPintor wrote:I'm still working out what an "ingeniero comercial" does

We use that job title in France to ("Ingénieur Commercial", I wore it a long time ago). It means a sales rep tasked with selling a technical product or service he/she doesn't quite understand.