Chaos Theory

I have a dream...

Someday a brilliant Vietnamese mathematician will come along and win the Nobel Prize for revolutionizing the field of Chaos Theory.

Why? Because CHAOS is key.

Vietnamese live and breathe chaos, like a fish breathes water.

I read this article recently and then read it again and had to post it.

Some will object that it has nothing to do with business, but if you ask me, it has everything to do with everything.

Electric poles, trees and even homes sag under the weight of a growing amount of telecom cables, which now outnumber those supplying the country’s electricity.

A thick black web of electric cables hangs menacingly over Trang Thi and Hang Khay streets near Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake. Tourists stop and stare in awe, often snapping photos of the chaotic wiring.

Residents on the city’s Luong Van Can Street no longer dare to go out on their balconies, afraid of being electrocuted by the labyrinth of wires hung on the side of their homes.

Nearly one million electric poles throughout the country are weighed down by masses of these telecom cables, 30 percent of which are damaged or in poor condition, according to Electricity of Vietnam (EVN).

The state-owned group said it earned some VND81 billion (US$4.6 million) last year from telecom firms such as the Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group, Viettel Telecom, FPT Telecom and Hanoi Telecom that hang their cables on EVN’s electric poles.

Telecom companies can apply for a legal permit to hang their cables on the poles, but many do not.

“Electric poles are [intended] to transmit electricity, not cable information,” said Nguyen Thanh Lam, head of the telecom and IT department at EVN. “But they are now carrying more telecom cables than wires that supply electricity.”

An employee of a telephone company in Ho Chi Minh City, who wished not to be named, said that as demand for telephone and data communication services increases in Vietnam, companies are becoming impatient waiting for a legal permit to install their cables.

The employee said he was once caught by police in the city’s Binh Thanh District and fined hundreds of dollars for hanging cables without permission. But he simply waited until a day when there were fewer guards patrolling the area and continued to hang the cables illegally.

Many companies also abuse EVN’s permit system, Lam said. They will claim to want to rent space on a pole to hang just a couple of cables, but end up hanging dozens of them, he added.

It takes just five to 10 minutes to hang a cable and that many are hung surreptitiously at night, according to Lam.

Le Van Duc, deputy director of the Hanoi Construction Department, said there are thousands of cables hanging illegally from poles in the city and no one is claiming responsibility for them.

Some cables have been hanging for 20-30 years but no telecom firms admit to owning them, Duc said.

Along HCMC’s Truong Son Street en route to the Tan Son Nhat International Airport, large masses of telecom cables hang loosely without being bundled.

Those in front of the Saigon Super Bowl commercial center sag down to just one meter above the ground. On nearby Tien Giang Street, hundreds of wires crisscross between the poles in a dizzying jumble.

Security guard To Thanh Dung said the cables have been that way for more than a year now. Dung said he would ask someone to fix them, but he doesn’t know who the cables belong to.

Huynh Van Nhuong, who lives on the street, said he takes it upon himself to tidy and package the cables together from time to time as there is no one else to do it. Moreover, telecom companies are continually adding even more wires to the mass, Nhuong added.

In Hanoi, many telecom companies have expanded beyond using the electric poles, and now hang bunches of wires on trees. On Hang Ngang and Hang Dao streets, the cables also hang threateningly from lampposts.

Local Tran Ngoc Minh compared the hanging cables to “nooses,” waiting to trap unlucky passersby.

Minh recalled once seeing a tall tourist become ensnared in a tangle of the low-hanging black wires, with one of the cables even wrapping around his neck.

EVN last September ordered its power company members to inspect their telecom cables on electric poles nationwide.

However, officer Minh Hue of the Hanoi Power Company said the task is difficult because the telecom cables are in such disarray.

Hue said the company officials cannot distinguish between the wires which supply electricity and the telecom cables, let alone determine which telecom cables belong to which company.

The Hanoi Power Company has moved its electricity-supply wires underground on several streets including Tran Phu, Le Hong Phong and Ngoc Ha, but in removing the electric poles, the telecom companies then turned to using nearby homes and trees to hang their cables from.

A resident in Binh Thanh District in HCMC said his house was connected to the Internet two days after he signed a contract with Viettel Telecom.

“The cable is hung on the electric poles outside and the Viettel employee told me that to hang a cable does not require a permit,” the resident said.

CHAOS is key.

Just remember that and it all makes sense...

And as our future Vietnamese Nobel Prize winner takes the stage to deliver his acceptance speech, he will tell the story of how he found inspiration for his prize-winning theory staring out his window at an impossible tangle of wires...