Virgin Media sets up 'smart poles' next to cabinets to boost mobile network capacity UK telco Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) says it can boost mobile services by sticking small cells on top of poles linked to its on-street fiber network cabinets. Trials of the "smart poles" with a miniature 4G or 5G mobile cell base station on top were deemed a success by the broadband provider, which claims these can be deployed …
Never heard if it before but it seems to be a thing.
https://www.edn.com/what-is-digital-electricity/
https://www.belden.com/blogs/digital-electricity-what-you-need-to-know
https://voltserver.com/digital-electricity/what-is-it/
https://www.powerelectronicsnews.com/digital-electricity-brings-intelligence-and-safety-into-power-transmission/
It says its 'safer' than mains wiring but from what I can see it is operating at 300-350VDC.
It says it's "touch safe" so I expect it would be 48VDC. 100V at a push.
A 5G radio for a "small cell" shouldn't need much power, right? 100W or so ought to be sufficient? 350V might be needed for a repeater in a 1000km submarine cable, but not for a few metres between a cabinet and a telegraph pole
Nearly choked on my coffee when I read "'digital electricity' allows power to be transmitted on a fibre optic cable" though! The marketing wonks at Vermin Media are either stoned or have been replaced by AI
The specs go up to 2kW so that would be an awful lot of amps and loss at 48V.
https://tessco-product-images-commerce-cloud-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/Resources/286695_214696_RX548_VSR.pdf
Voltage 310-350V (336V Nominal)
I assume they make it 'touch safe' with lots of monitoring.
The link you posted vindicates your assumption. If the power sending module doesn't get confirmation from the power receiving module that resistance etc are nominal, it cuts power immediately. This check happens 500 times per second. Therefore even at 350V the most energy that is sent into a fault is one joule.
Clever.
I've survived kV. (The breakdown field strength of air is ~3 kV/mm so any static spark you've been zapped by is guaranteed kV.) I imagine you could be killed at a few volts potential difference, if someone was determined enough. It's normally said to be the current that matters (I really wonder if it's really the power?) and high currents and high voltages tend to coincide, but it's not guaranteed.
I once heard a story from an old electrical contractor about when he was called to some mansion in the scottish highlands that had its own 11kV substation. He says he had isolated the supply and locked the switchroom to work on the busbars (i guess probably he was on the 400V side) but hadn't reckoned on the janitor having a key, ignoring the sign saying Do Not Operate, and throwing it back on to make his tea.
The contractor was up a ladder with his hands on two different busbars at the time, but survived to tell the tale because apparently he was thrown clear like timmy from Jurassic Park..
Moral of the story: Always lock out with your OWN padlock
Could have been a tall tale of course, but nonetheless instructive
On the other end of the scale, I also knew an electrical engineer who said she wouldn't touch a 12V car battery, "cos its the current that kills you". I didn't argue - never a good idea with that one.
> I also knew an electrical engineer who said she wouldn't touch a 12V car battery
I’m very cautious when connecting jump leads especially on to a discharged battery; many years back saw my neighbour blow one up because they had connected the power lead to the good battery first and naturally the spark of connecting to the dead battery was sufficient to ignite the hydrogen…
I amazes me how few people, even those from a technical background, grasp Ohm's law and its implications.
Everything else being equal, the current through a load is directly proportional to the applied potential (voltage).
20mA is not very good for you. For a nominal 12V source, your body's resistance would have to be below 12 / 0.02 = 600 Ohms. The skin of a dry hand typically has a resistance of tens of thousands of Ohms. No 12V source is going to even give you a tickle. Probably best not connect it to the inside of your mouth, though.
There are, of course, other factors to consider, like the internal resistance of the power source and the possibility of high voltages damaging your skin. But they don't really apply to a 12V battery.
A quick web crawl through up this document, which seems quite comprehensive.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2763825/
-A.
Well, that's as may be.
My point concerns the apparently widespread belief that current (amps) and potential difference (volts) are somehow independent variables, whereas, in fact, one is a function of the other. And this is what Ohm's law very plainly and unambiguously states.
-A.
Well, actually..
Ohm's law is not really very good. Most things are actually "non-ohmic devices" i.e. the current is NOT proportional to the voltage. Usually it is still a function of voltage, but even then, not always. Even an old-fashioned lightbulb is "non-ohmic" because its resistance changes drastically as the filament warms up. Halve the voltage and you do NOT halve the current. It's lower, but not as low as you expect, because the filament temperature has changed.
Consider, for example, the Zener Diode, which exhibits "infinite" resistance at voltages below its breakdown-voltage, and (ideally) "zero" resistance above it. Or the standard IT power supply, which is a circuit driving a constant (or at least unrelated) power to a downstream load - raise the voltage and the current drops. Lower the voltage and the current increases, keeping the power constant to whatever the downstream load requires.
A thin insulating membrane, such as dry skin, is like the dielectric of a parallel-plate capacitor. Much like the zener diode (but with less precision), a capacitor supplied with a slowly-increasing DC voltage will eventually fail and become a conductor when it reaches its dielectric breakdown voltage, which depends on the material and its thickness
Below 60V or so, dry skin has a very high resistance. Your multimeter will give you something of the order of megohms. Above 200V and the dielectric has failed, and the current is limited now by the ionic conductivity of your body, which is electrochemistry. The exact point where your skin turns from insulator to electrode depends on how thick it is at the thinnest part in contact with the live wire, and any water present will ensure that every part of it (including the very bottoms of any ridges on your fingers) are in contact with the voltage.
And then when you throw AC into the mix, you have an additional current passing across the capacitance itself, proportional to the rate-of-change-of-voltage. (I = C dV/dt)
It's slightly depressing that we have to go here, but OK.
What you are describing is variance in the resistance of the circuit. Ohm's law continues to hold.
It's a fair point that resistance is not set in stone. Even the electronic components described as "resistors" exhibit drift, often related to temperature.
Nevertheless, in all cases V=IR, no exceptions. So the idea that a 12V lead-acid accumulator might be dangerous because it is capable of delivering a large current remains specious nonsense. The discharge is wholly dependant on the resistance of the circuit.
Let's not digress into quantum effects, eh?
-A.
There’s a well known risk swimming around boats connected to mains power, say in a marina. A bad connection can cause current to leak to ground through the water, and if you happen to be in the the water it can be fatal - even though the voltage difference between you head and feet is perhaps only a few tens of volts.
I would have thought that in very saline water a human will not carry much of the current. In fresh water there is greater risk.
At Newbury racecourse, an underground cable became decayed and began passing current through the earth, creating a potential difference between the source at the broken cable, graduating down to ground at a metre or two. Humans walking in the area reported a strange sensation, but their feet being close together they were only bridging a small PD. Two horses with more distance between front and back legs suffered a large shock and died on the spot. If a human had fallen foward onto their hands in the same spot then they might have met a similar fate.
I can beat that although I don't know by how much.
Working on an old trinitron tv (when such things were current tech) I was adjusting the power supply output (from memory it should have been 117v and it was just over 100), the only way of setting it was via the trimmer while the set was on and the trimmers location was directly underneath the tube (insulated tool and a healthy respect for how close to get to a live tube)
I adjusted the trimmer and watched in the mirror as the picture came back to full size and watched on the meter as the voltage came up to where it should be everything seemed fine,
then as I removed the tool (happy that the TV was now setup properly and fully working) the trimmer fell apart (meaning there was no longer anything limiting the output voltage of the supply).
I heard the screech of the power supply going overload, I vaguely saw a blue flash and then I detected the wall on the far side of the room with my back closely followed by the floor with my backside as I landed.
about 3 days later I could feel properly again with my right hand / arm (and the bruise on my back faded)
testing the power supply about a month later it gave out a little over 400v without the trimmer in place, since everything in the tv was scaled up from this voltage the usual 26kv (from 117v) could have gone as high as 88kv although other parts of the set probably gave up before it got that high
I was plugging everything together to test the EHT circuit, I connected power, signal, scan coil and with the EHT cap (that plugs into the back of the glass CRT) still in my had I switched on the power.
It was interesting.
A party trick was to surround the EHT transformer with metal foil and allow a purple plasma arc to jump across about 1-2cm from corner of the foil to a finger tip. It would burn a little black dot on your skin but you could barely feel it.
Funniest was with a trim tool though, two guys peering into the back of a monitor, one with a trim tool the other just looking. The trim tool guy got a shock and his hand came out so quick he knocked a tooth out of the other guy.
I was a new Electronics Engineer and the senior guy had designed the monitor by just copying the reference design from the CRT manufacturer. We spent hours improving and testing it. We soaked up a lot of Bremsstrahlung radiation in those days, I had no idea but it was probably more dangerous than the EMF.
Pretty sure 48V DC can kill too, if you have thin skin and wet hands... Always keep one hand behind your back
I wouldn't want to touch 100V DC, however BS7671:2028 (IET wiring regs 18th ed) says in 414.1.1 (iii) limitation of voltage to 50V AC or 120V DC for SELV/PELV. I would guess this lower than expected limit for AC is because of the capacitance of the epidermis, which is not an issue for DC. I have had a few capacitively-coupled shocks and it stings a bit, but not as bad as being burned by a real shock.
Pretty sure 48V DC can kill too, if you have thin skin and wet hands... Always keep one hand behind your back
Yep. Or I was taught to keep hands in pockets. Better to trip over a cable and faceplant than grab a bus bar to prevent fall. But..
On the other end of the scale, I also knew an electrical engineer who said she wouldn't touch a 12V car battery, "cos its the current that kills you". I didn't argue - never a good idea with that one.
I confess I don't even like messing with car batteries having seen what happens when you short them. But having worked around high power stuff, I have a healthy fear of it and would much rather leave that stuff to people that know what they're doing. I know enough to be dangerous, and also kick some 'consultants' off-site for wanting to install $1m+ Juniper BFRs that would draw 160A with 30A cooker cable. Kinda pointed them at the fire suppression cylinders that cost around $50k a refill, and told them to go forth and multiply until they came back with a qualified electrician. I can't help thinking that the rush for EVs and charging infrastructure's going to lead to some Darwinian selection of sparkies, and probably keep the fire service in overtime.
The main bit of car maintenance I've had to do over the last few years is removing and replacing batteries. I miss the old days when turning the key to the "0" position meant that there was no electrical draw, so that there was no spark when putting the negative terminal back. Electric clocks used to cause a tiny spark, but with the multitude of electrics/electronics in modern cars, the spark is bug and loud. I hate it!
> told them to go forth and multiply until they came back with a qualified electrician.
I once got a belt sufficient to embed my screwdriver in the plaster of the wall opposite off a fused spur with the fuse removed. The "qualified electrician" had wired the fuse in to the neutral side.
-A.
Railway signalling has a lot of antiquated, grandfathered electrical equipment, and one of the standard equipment voltages we use is 110V DC.
When you open a signalling equipment cabinet built prior to the 1990s, you can guarantee that there will be an unshielded exposed terminal block inside and will have busbars ranging from 24 to 140v DC, up to 110v AC and even in some areas, a poorly shielded 650v AC terminal (though these are being replaced with new Functional Supply Points in separate and far more modern adjacent cabinets as they are lethal).
If I had a pound for every time I’ve inadvertently made contact with the 110v busbar, either AC or DC, I wouldn’t need to still be out there maintaining the things.
We do have gauntlets and stuff of course, but have you ever tried to handle a 2Ba nut wearing a latex gauntlet? Also, the option to completely power down the cabinet to work on it is rarely available, thanks to the need to keep trains running.
I’ve often described the sensation of an electric shock as not being painful (at those levels), but the most aggressive tickle you’ve ever received.
When you open a signalling equipment cabinet built prior to the 1990s, you can guarantee that there will be an unshielded exposed terminal block inside and will have busbars ranging from 24 to 140v DC, up to 110v AC and even in some areas, a poorly shielded 650v AC terminal (though these are being replaced with new Functional Supply Points in separate and far more modern adjacent cabinets as they are lethal).
I wonder if there's a psychological effect sometimes with DC kit. 48V DC doesn't sound so scarey. From dredging back in my memory, the Juniper BFRs had hefty commando connectors and needed 3-phase, so looked like they meant business. The DC PSUs just had cable clamps under a perspex shield, so maybe appear more innocent. Same tin, same power requirements, much the same hazards. Also true for a lot of high power telco kit and wonder if the lack of protection is an assumption that people ordering DC options should know what they're doing.. Which can be false. In the example I gave, the facilities guy was being ignored because the consultancy were mates of the execs, so I was asked to review the install and back him up. Office politics get weird and dangerous like that sometimes.
Pretty sure 48V DC can kill too
I heard something from an electrical safety course (too many years ago now to be able to remember the details) that a surprisingly low voltage can be fatal, if you're particularly unlucky. The case quoted on the course had something to do with the voltage hitting you exactly in synch with a heartbeat, so you get a kind of effect where the "wave" from the errant electricity resonates with the "wave" in your cardiac system and you get a resonance which is big enough to ruin your day.
(as you can tell from the wording here I am neither an electrician nor a cardiologist - please don't judge my explanation too harshly)
In the slightly more recent era of PSTN, phone lines had a nominal 50V PD between A and B, superimposed on which would be an additional 50V pulsing signal for ringing. So there could be 100V at most.
I'm not aware that this ever killed anyone. I believe that this was by design.
-A.
"Nearly choked on my coffee when I read "'digital electricity' allows power to be transmitted on a fibre optic cable" though!"
Did you not read that it said:
[quote]
Hybrid Cables.' These are cables that include copper cores for the Volt-Server power transmission as well as fibres for connectivity.
[/end]
Nearly choked on my coffee when I read "'digital electricity' allows power to be transmitted on a fibre optic cable" though! The marketing wonks at Vermin Media are either stoned or have been replaced by AI
And it'll be suitable for EV charging.
But it's all perfectly technically feasible. It simply needs, say, a 100kW laser launching into the fibre, and a 100kW photodiode at the other end to convert light back to power. Light to energy is much easier, especially if the connectors haven't been cleaned. This technology also has the advantage of minimising vandalism attempts, or at least repeat vandalism and makes it easier to identify criminals by standard DNA testing.
> It says it's "touch safe" so I expect it would be 48VDC
That's old-think. You can hold 48V forever.
Shock is generally conceded to be time-dependent. The GFIC/RCB devices allow a small shock for a long time but big shocks cut off quick.
Modern electronics can be really quick. While I think the available literature is marketing BS, milliSeconds are invoked and I sure can cut-off CAT-size power much faster than that.
The intended destination for the power probably has a distinctive non-linear impedance, a diode-capacitor power filter. (OTOH, the impedance of skin&meat is distinctive over Time: high at first then dropping as cell walls break down.) It may also have the smarts to report-back (in the next packet) how much energy it absorbed... if less than energy sent, there's a problem.
All that says to me is "spurious-trip hazard".
Safety vs reliability: In reliability engineering, there is no such thing as "fail safe" - only fail.
Monitoring for minute changes in power-line impedance only introduces a new EM-induced failure mode. Never mind a solar flare, you'll be down the next time the arc-welding shop next door starts their shift.
What's more important, your network or the rat that pissed on the cable?
I once worked in traffic controllers, and I heard stories of street cabinets being left loose or open, only for some drunk to have a slash inside..
A urine stream is full of electrolytes.. 240VAC up the wazzer - Drunk or not, that's not something he'll forget in a hurry!
Modern electronics can be really quick. While I think the available literature is marketing BS, milliSeconds are invoked and I sure can cut-off CAT-size power much faster than that.
The marketing says 500 Hz, 75% square wave, so 0.375+ ms. I was surprised it was that slow, (I guess they are trying to keep radiated-emissions down), but a typical 50-60 Hz earth-leakage protection device typical breaks at 20-30 ms, so 0.4 is evidently good enough, even at the higher voltage.
From the description, it's an unbalanced voltage, grounded on one side. That means there's a serious corrosion risk somewhere. I wonder how they handle that?
I was told as a child that AC was more dangerous because it keeps making your muscles twitch*, so you can't let go. Hence the advice to touch anything suspect with the back of the hand.
Back then it wouldn't have occurred to anyone to advise simply not touching anything suspect at all.
-A.
* I've experienced this altogether too many** times. Touching mains definitely vibrates your muscles.
** Empirically it definitely seems to me possible to acquire tolerance to electrocution.
The really nasty belts are from RF. I had the misfortune to get a "small" shock from the corona around an over-voltaged RF valve and yelled "ouch!" at the time. The following morning, I noticed a penny-sized circle on the bottom of my foot and my knee hurt a lot. The increasing pain got to the point that a trip to A&E proved necessary, where they discovered that I had internal burns down one side of my body!
Very nasty indeed!
Beer - obviously - for its anaesthetic properties!
Thank you @blackcat for supplying the powerelectronicsnews.com link. It explains clearly how how 350V AC has been made 'touch safe":
“We have developed what we call a packet energy transfer,” said Luke Getto, director of product management at VoltServer. “To make it very simple to understand, think about a square wave with a 75% duty cycle. For three-quarters of the packet, we are sending power, while for one-quarter of the same packet, we are doing what we call our safety check. The safety check allows us to know if the packet has been properly sent and received.”
"During the safety check, the system can determine if there has been a short-circuit, a resistive fault, an open circuit, and things like that. As long as no fault is detected, the system keeps sending the energy packets, while as soon an error is detected, transmission is stopped immediately. Packets are sent at a very high rate — roughly 500 packets per second. However, each single packet counts for a small quantity of energy. If a fault has been detected, the sending of packets is stopped, and the resulting energy dissipated into a fault is only about one joule. This allows VoltServer to use a much higher voltage that reduces the current and allows for small conductors (18–16 AWG) to be used"
> https://www.edn.com/what-is-digital-electricity/
“ What they apparently offer is a way to send very short, very high-voltage pulses for long distances over standard, low-power cabling”
Had that in the 1980s, with newly installed thyristor control systems - caused IT systems to glitch and reset… whilst those cables might be safe to handle, care will be needed to ensure they are only connected to devices that support digital electricity.
Aside. I note none of the articles actually describe digital electricity in sufficient detail for any one to get a real understanding of the principles involved. I would have thought by now (six years for the EDN article) there would be decent learning resources sufficient for GCSE level of study and undergrad level books…
Time division multiplexing of power and data. During the power slot the data part shuts off to avoid being zapped. But why would you need that if the data is on the fibre part of the "hybrid cable"? And "touch-safe"? Seems to be a clever automatic disconnect that detects loss of carrier and shuts it off, or maybe its just a DC sensitive RCD.
I mean obviously the green cabinets already receive power. Is the problem that they need a lot more power before they can bolt on the mini cell tower?
Ugly as *uck though. And the telcos wonder why people are fire-bombing the local infrastructure...
This was what 5G was peddled as in the first place. It looks as if we now get yet another crop of poles. Once Voodoophone get into this my daughter might get a pole beside the box they planted right in front of her sloping bit of garden which can only be easily tended from the footpath. That'll accompany the street-light a few metres away against the entrance to her garage.
Quite.
In a quiet little suburban town, we were told that we would get 5G and even had letters through to announce it.
I was quite excited as the workplace where that was has AWFUL 3G/4G reception, as in it's almost impossible to make a call without walking outside and going down the road somewhat.
We got all the planning letters, all the notification, we were actually looking at getting a Netgear Nighthawk to act as a backup line of some substance (given BT's penchant to just keep increasing prices and cutting services).
There was already a pole and cabinet at the location, there's nothing nearby of any worth, there are no areas of outstanding natural beauty to ruin.
18 months later, it was killed by NIMBYs.
Probably the same ones who rent our facilities and then moan on a regular basis that they can't make calls and can't take credit cards (and, no, you're not using our Wifi to do that) while on the site.
When I was a kid there were the enormous brown telegraph poles, about 10 metres high ex-tree-trunks that had been pressure treated in bitumen perhaps.
These things radiated cables like spokes to each house, some aerial cable runs as long as (guesstimate) 70 metres. I wondered if they had been replaced with subterranean, but recently noticed they are still there. Serving their dual purpose of dog/drunk urinals and telecoms infrastructure.
Perhaps when these appeared in the mid 20th century people were complaining about their appearance or were just pleased to have a phone.
Very few people use POTS landline now, so at some point these big logs are going to go and be replaced by underground fibre and wireless. But they must be 80+ years old, they are a solid piece of infrastructure engineering.
Bravo. Someone summed it up.
Also - those spider webs of cables are a perfect storm of bird droppings, problems when things get windy, shoes lobbed over them, etc.
As someone who buys leased lines on occasion, I can also tell you that those providers who offered to run it "along the telegraph poles" were roundly dismissed, especially when their own engineers told them that it would be highly susceptible to movement over the years and that's not what you want on direct fibre run for a leased line.
I moved into a lovely little rural house recently in a tiny little rural town and was actually surprised to see that the whole street was supplied with one such bitumen-soaked pole with huge dangling cables to each house - I'm literally yards from an area of outstanding natural beauty, the houses are all fabulous rural cottages and thatched farmhouses, and it's the ugliest part of the whole street. It also has guylines cutting far into people's exquisite little gardens, bird spikes along 30-40 feet of each radial cable, and it takes up what little there is of the pavement left over.
It also means that we're never going to get FTTP or possibly even FTTC this decade.
I can only imagine that - whenever it was, 80-90 years ago - when it was first put in, people objected just the same. And they're quite right in terms of aesthetics, but if you wanted a landline it's the only viable cost alternative, because digging up a line to every house is exactly what bankrupted NTL and scarred every pavement in the major UK towns with their cuttings.
I've also been told recently that the POTS line won't be voice-capable for much longer and I must move to a SIP-based VoIP "Digital Voice" using the line purely as a DSL line for transmitting such. At that point, and coupled with the fact that I can't get above 40Mbps no matter what I do here, I really would rather just snip that line entirely and use some other alternative because the landline provides literally zero advantage if I have to power the router, operate a VoIP account, etc. myself anyway. The only alternatives are about 3 times more expensive per month (e.g. Starlink, etc.)
So we have a choice - we can have modern tech and have masts, or we can pay through the nose and find alternate technologies to progress to anything reasonable, or we can stop all such and never have mobile coverage. Given the options, I think I'd rather have the modern pole.
Theoretically, yes. They could run both power and data from the cabinet to the lamp post and put the small cell at the top. The issue is that councils either do not want to allow Telcos to do so or that the council have outsourced the street lamps to a third party with no interest in engaging with 3rd parties.
In my experience in property/asset maintenance - Every hierarchical step of the council is either treading water and barely managing to keep the posts from falling over, or too executive to know where their nose is on their face.
Actually manifesting progress in these large institutions is borderline impossible. Your best bet is to go to an impressionable high up person and convince them it was their idea (It's who you know)
That's pretty much the case. I've worked for a third party PFI highways lighting contractor, and back in 2015 we hoped this would be a nice income stream, as well as facilitating better mobile connectivity. In practice it was difficult to get the telcos (and often their outsourced mast providers!) to engage, it was difficult to get councils to engage, the bug bear of anti-5G cretins made elected councillors nervous (and to an extent infrastructure managers). Because of the cost of trenching in made up ground, to be viable it needed the happy coincidence of a cabinet within a few metres of a suitable lamp column - if more than a few metres, the cost of a new column is less than the trenching. Broad brush numbers, £1,000 for a brand new column to be installed not including the aerials, £100 per metre for trenching and reinstatement in made up ground, and bear in mind there's a perceived cost to relying on somebody else's column. Not all existing lighting columns are suitable - old ones may be rusty and near life expired, newer ones may already be covered in wireless connectivity for managing the street lights, for the police's national spy camera network, or with a surfeit of roadsigns (there's only so much weight and wind load allowable on a lighting column). Factor in that network operators don't need a mini-mast everywhere there's an available and suitable column, and very quickly the practicality of doing this repeatably at scale melted away. For a demonstration case it's easy - quite a few of these across the country. But when trying to make a good business case to companies investing billions in their mast networks it looked more noise than substance, and the time and effort in getting a handful of lighting columns used as mini masts is no longer warranted.
Some might assert that existing telco ducting could be cheaply used between any suitable cabinet and a lamp, but that leads into into feasibility surveys including third party infrastructure for each site, possible wayleaves of PIA agreements if the network doesn't own any ducting and all the costs then wiped out putative savings. Which is exactly why VMO2 put up the mast as in the photo - quick, simple, cheap, within their control other than for a simple streetworks permission for the modest digging required.
I can imagine a cheap camera being put into the side of the cabinet so that the perps can be prosecuted when they try to demolish the things. A brief stay for a few individuals at His Majesty's pleasure, alongside recoupment of costs through the courts, and this problem solves itself, along with possibly a few others.
A brief stay for a few individuals at His Majesty's pleasure, alongside recoupment of costs through the courts, and this problem solves itself
Yeah but no, looking at the state of prison overcrowding around the world it's pretty obvious that the chance of prison isn't much of a deterrence at all. The sort of people who'd be put off by the threat of slammer time aren't the sort of people who go round vandalising stuff.
The sort of people who go around vandalising stuff are either too stupid to consider the consquences of their actions, or do it on principle (by that genuine, misguided, or outright deluded) and fully accept the consequences.
"The issue is that councils either do not want to allow Telcos to do so or that the council have outsourced the street lamps to a third party with no interest in engaging with 3rd parties."
I'd have thought that these days most councils would be only too eager to rake money for this (as would 3rd parties) so either offering money hasn't been tried or they can't find the right option in their Oracle/SAP/whatever systems to process the transactions.
"I'd have thought that these days most councils would be only too eager to rake money for this (as would 3rd parties) so either offering money hasn't been tried or they can't find the right option in their Oracle/SAP/whatever systems to process the transactions."
Given the relatively low cost to the network operator of putting up their own column, the rent they'd pay per to rent space on a lighting column is very low - say £80 a year per column or less. Income agreements for attachments typically specify a fifty fifty split between council and PFI operator, and it starts looking like chicken feed pretty quickly, especially given the limitations on suitability of columns noted above. The PFI operator then has to pay the council monthly (see published PFI contracts for highways lighting) bill the network and receive the networks payments. Most streetlighting is provided by upper tier authorities (county and unitary councils), if you can find 500 suitable coincidences of cabinet, lighting column and network need, that's £20k. Now compare that to an upper tier authority budget (using my fairly representative CC as an example) which for a rural shire is in the £400m-500m range - and for the likes of Birmingham around £3bn.
It's a nice idea that simply doesn't scale well, nor save enough money.
The probably could have, but look at that pole: are they gonna run a conduit up the side of it? Dig a hole into the power conduit and run up inside with the power cable? Then they have to run the antenna clear. And what happens when the council wants to replace or modify their luminaire?
Plus they probably need permission from the pole owner operator to do that, even if permission is automatic. Plus the whole set of additional safety regulations.
Long term, it might make sense to design light poles for 5g service, particularly because there are people who /do/ care, but totally understandable that it's not a realistic option for that kind of light pole.
Grey is not good.
ISTR an experiment was carried out where ne'er do wells tended to congregate around cabinets like these with their laughing gas canisters. Apparently painting the cabinets pink reduced the tendency to use them as a place to hang out.
It's been colour matched, not color matched. The all-pervading grey is the give-away (and in that sense grey *is* the best colour to use to blend in...).
Notably though it's not been colour matched with the pre-existing lamp post (itself designed to blend in with the greenery that was presumably there at one point), which it could have done by simply using it. It might also have meant a cheaper installation which didn't make the street clutter worse.
Also they are repeatedly put in the most obvious locations.
In know it is only a bit of green behind but why the hell can they not put the sodding cabinets again fences. Also while they at it not chose the only narrow bit of pavement to obstruct and so on.,
There is no common sense of anything.
Where I am we have survived without Virgin Media cable however someone finally decided that all the pavements can be dug up to install the cable. Where the little crappy plastic lid on the pavement goes is being put in crazy locations, in the middle of the exit to a drive when there is grass 1m to the left.
I suspect the motivation for this is that we are very close to having the BT Digital Voice roll out and VM are trying to get customers before BT.
I dunno, as a child I balanced atop a green BT junction box in a country lane to reach sloes from a blackthorn bush (I guess our mothers thought sending us out to forage gin ingredients was a constructive way of getting us out of the house). I remember thinking at the time that the slope of the thing's lid wasn't ideal for my purpose.
Those Vodafone things are ugly though. Last month I was waiting at a bus stop in France and admiring the industrial design of a utility cabinet with vertical flutings.
"VMO2 also claims that smart city infrastructure, including electric vehicle chargers, could be connected to smart poles in future."
How much power do Virgin run to those cabs then? If they want to move into EV charging then I can see the streets being dug up again for more copper power cables to be installed - just after all the digging to get rid of copper.
Like almost all street furniture it will be running off the ring main in the road. Most street lights are fused with min 20-25A fuses, allowing for 16A EV charging (3.6kW) or more in some cases. This has already been widely deployed in London successfully. Applying it to BT cabinets and the like is pretty much the same, they'll probably want some additional assurance that a fault with the EV doesn't take the cab down (so would independently fuse it most likely) but other than that it shouldn't be any more difficulty.
"We asked VMO2 if it intended to provide "appropriate community engagement," even if there is no official need for planning permission.
The company told The Register it always works "closely with Local Authorities before installing new infrastructure and notify residents ahead of works taking place."
So for VMO2, "appropriate community engagement" = putting up a sign a few days before saying telco works will take place here. That's neither 'appropriate' nor 'engagement'; in fact even 'community' is debatable.
I've been musing over the "Charge Evs" element of this.
How much digitised optical energy are Virgin going to be pumping along their fibre optic cables to adequately power a solar cell with enough energy to generate a practical EV charging amount of power?
Then if that optical cable breaks will the emerging high power light become a "weapon of mass destruction"?
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