Posted in
Main on April 3rd, 2009 by Pingdom
We live in Sweden, a very organized country when it comes to things like infrastructure, electricity, etc. However, there are some countries that have a more “organic” approach to their cabling…
Here are some of the most insane examples of electrical (and phone?) cabling that we have found. Imagine being the electrician called in to fix a problem with that wiring. You’d get the wonderful opportunity to get both electrocuted AND entangled.

Photo by Dave Nix (My name is Dave on Flickr).
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Photo by Jeremy (Famous People on Flickr).
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Photo by Travis (Travois on Flickr).
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Photo by Nick (jpnick on Flickr).
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Photo by Alaya on Flickr. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
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Photo by Kelly Cheng. Delhi, India.
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Photo by Rebecca Desmots (Bec@ on Flickr).
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Photo by Ryan Greenberg.
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Photo by Ewa (Noelii on Flickr). Delhi, India.
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Photo by Christopher (Augapfel on Flickr).
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Photo by Gianpaolo Fusari (wazuluwazu on Flickr).
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Photo by crisintis on Flickr. Kobe, Japan.
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Photo by Pingdom’s very own CEO, Sam Nurmi. Bangkok, Thailand.
Want to test your site every minute?
Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2012 by Pingdom
As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.
Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.
What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.
Read more
Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2012 by Pingdom
Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h
This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.
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Posted in
Main on February 2nd, 2012 by Pingdom
Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.
Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.
We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.
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Posted in
Main,
Mobile podcast on February 2nd, 2012 by Pingdom
Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.
In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.
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Posted in
Main on January 31st, 2012 by Pingdom
Want to be able to download a DVD worth of data in about 38 minutes? It may not seem very impressive, but that’s with the average Internet speed in South Korea, according to the latest “State of the Internet” report by Akamai.
Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The country scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.
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Stormy
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:37 am
Wow… All I can say is wow. That looks worse than my hair on a Sunday morning!
Chocoloco
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:06 am
My only comment:
Holy s**t!
_ck_
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:06 am
Some of those look like “end-user patches” to get free power.
There was a story on PBS where they were trying to get people used to the idea of paying for power (in Russia I believe) when they were used to getting it for free under the old communist ways. People refused to pay (and really could barely afford to in the first place).
The power company people would go out and find these very scary nests of hacks to steal power – sometimes they would find dead bodies where people had electrocuted themselves accidentally
CrystalPalaceCasinoNassau
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:25 am
OMG!!!…
Nick
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Awesome collection. Hats off to all the photographers.
Rick
April 3rd, 2009 at 1:49 pm
What is the static load bearing capability of a utility pole? I’m sure that some of these poles are near that limit.
If one of these poles goes, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole local network of poles go down like dominoes tied together with string.
Bob
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Yip, this is electricity, phone and cable tv wiring at it’s best.
It’s often when the electrician (or cable installer) comes out to fix a problem or install a new connection that makes this worse. They look at the mess on the pole above them, and decide that installing a new cable is a better idea than trying to find the fault.
guest
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:33 pm
This looks like some of the cable/phone poles wired by the dopeheads that work for Time-Warner in Queens and Brooklyn.
lesserdevil
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:41 pm
@_ck_: New Orleans, United States. I got sick of being in the dark followin Katrina. The grid was on, but the electric company wasn’t turning on houses without inspections. I popped open the meter box and hammered conductive plate metal into place on both sides, and voila, instant free electricity.
Then came a stormy day weeks after that. The power went out. I went to check the plate metal hack. One of them had, indeed, slipped out of place somehow. I attempted to put it back into place with a pair of pliers wrapped in electrical tape, while I was standing in a puddle of rain water.
I woke up a few minutes later. Witnesses said the arc was so bright they thought sure I was dead. And that’s th story of how I learned never to play with electricity again.
Andy
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Add this one
http://www.lolhome.com/img_big/funny-picture-450961003.jpg
Adam
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Lesserdevil, that was just silly. Electrical tape does not guranatee isolation :O
Guest
April 4th, 2009 at 5:50 am
He’s a fan: http://www.ivarhagendoorn.com/photos/tags/wires
Preshit
April 4th, 2009 at 9:51 am
These two have got to be the most EPIC and I’m surprised they’re not a part of the list.
http://i.presh.it/electrical-cabling-gone-wild-1.jpeg
http://i.presh.it/electrical-cabling-gone-wild-2.jpeg
Kirchoff’s Current Law (KCL):
At every node, the sum of all currents entering a node must equal zero.
Kirchoff’s Voltage Law (KVL):
The voltage law says that the sum of voltages around every closed loop in the circuit must equal zero.
Now apply the law to the above pictures
Alexander
April 5th, 2009 at 12:59 am
This is a fine collection – perhaps next time around visit Hanoi and Manila. They have some amazing systems which will awe your understanding of science – that wooden poles can manage to bear such weight and that power manages to get through despite so much splicing. Then again, some areas in those cities are prone to brownouts.
Echiner
April 6th, 2009 at 8:21 am
Here you have one more:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/decadence/3256093753/
This one is in Bangkok’s chinatown.
PAPowerball
April 6th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
wow… spiderman was there…
end23
July 8th, 2009 at 2:08 am
Amazing Thailand
Electrical Rewiring
August 21st, 2009 at 5:54 am
I think,more electrical cables will provide more electrical problems.
Suhaib Malik
September 15th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Hats off to them who troubleshoot under this condition
bah
May 1st, 2010 at 6:57 pm
most of the poles in the pictures are steel. And the location is most likely a junction area that connects several systems. I don’t think they look all too complicated.
John
May 12th, 2010 at 2:24 am
Actually, a majority of these are telephone wires, not electrical…
Kop
August 19th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
And to think, if Thomas Edison had had his way, each of those power lines would have to be a foot in diameter.