Telcos scolded for unwanted erection of utility poles in race to wire up Britain The UK issue of multiplying telegraph poles is arising again, with telecoms minister Chris Bryant meeting operators over sharing their infrastructure and consulting residents before installation. With the push to enable high-speed internet access across all corners of the country, telecoms companies have been laying out fiber …
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You should see the USA - New York State’s Electricity and Telecoms infrastructure handing from poles looks like a Third World Country. Esp. Smaller towns, suburbs and rural.
Not quite Bangkok … but not far off it.
Round here the problem is more CityFibre and never ending unsafe wildcat roadworks. Inc mobile ones.
Esp. As Vermin Media already long cover town and OpenReach have just about completed 21CNing town so a 3rd level/overlap of fast internet - 2 full fibre, one fibre/DOCSIS.
Round my area we had Grain dig up the pavements and put in ducts for fibre, often concreting over the Virgin access points in the process...
We have had new poles, but all of them so far have actually been OpenReach and linked to other poles, and given the droop on my FTTP cable over the couple of months since it was fitted, I sort of understand why they want the extra poles.
Back in the late 90's when cable was first rolling out, they were not allowed to put up poles: Everything had to be buried. Even BT was supposed to be taking down poles and using buried cable.
BT made a start, but never did complete that transition, obviously, but there's still a push to reduce the number of poles in use...
Seems that's being ignored.
There's even areas with a local ordinance forbidding suspended wires... which is also being ignored.
Guess the local bird population is happy, though.
It takes a lot less time and money to string a fiber from the top of a pole to the house then it does to trench across a road, through the front garden and put in a conduit to hold that same fiber. Even when the conduit is already there it can still be easier as conduits can often become blocked.
Round our way, due to the vintage of streets and houses, there is a mix of underground ducts and overhead poles for existing telephone copper. In some streets it is literally both as the cable goes underground between poles then pops up at the pole to go overhead across the roads and gardens into people's roofs. You could probably date the houses quite precisely in one street where halfway along it changes from poles to ducts and poles and then to fully ducted into the house. Fibre that has been going in the last few years is mostly using the ducts where they exist, so they are sharing infrastructure in that sense.
However, when it comes to getting that fibre out of the ground and into a house, it often seems to be either the existing poles, or put new poles in. Even where the original copper is fully underground, there are still poles being put in as a quick and dirty way of serving several houses with fibre from one point.
There is a lane near me that had fibre strung alongside the existing overhead copper, that literally goes through trees. It's notorious for the telephone cable coming down every few years in a storm as tree branches fall off and take the cable with them. I don't see the fibre being immune to that, but I also understand why a surveyor might have looked at it and decided to use the existing poles on the basis of cost.
I live in rural France and the phone lines are overhead, and quite prone to being buggered up by the local farmers and their complete lack of giving shits about the infrastructure (unless, of course, it affects them).
It hadn't been up two weeks when one of the twats tried to take a tractor with a muck spreader tank down the little lane and around a tight bend with the concrete electric pole on one side and the metal phone pole on the other. One was not going to survive. It was the phone pole they decided to crush, leaving it drooping precariously across the lane. A couple of days later they cut the weeds along the edge of the field and managed to hit the pole hard enough that it snapped the copper cable, which promptly got caught in the blades and yanked off the next pole down hard enough that it also brought the fibre down (but being tighter it didn't end up shredded). Came home to find the fibre nearly at ground level across the lane and the remains of the copper thrown in the lane like it was my fault the guy's a dickhead. I tied the fibre to the pole to hold it back off the lane as best I could and reported it all to Orange who eventually came and fixed it.
But, damn, I'm quite impressed with the fibre. Maybe it has metal braiding in the cable or something? The only downside is one needs to take bets as to when the next round of stupid will happen. It's almost time for the big harvesters to bring in the maize......
When I looked at Openreach duct access for our local community (we were fed up of waiting for decent speeds), the fees would have made extortion look reasonable. That, along with the fact that the access could be revoked after two years (along with a charge to remove "our" equipment) and the fact we would have to pay to have any existing blockages repaired made the project unviable.
Luckily, we ended up as a "test area" for semi-rural FTTP a few years later - ducted where available, using existing poles where not.
Yeah, when I read in the article where VM are quoted as saying their poles/ducts are available at commercial rates, my first thought was "how much?", and would the ongoing rental costs be worth it in the long run, or just cheaper to put separate poles in? Yes, I'm a cynic and it's nice to be proven right :-)
I suspect it will end up with legislation directing companies to use "fair and reasonable" cross-charging/pricing structures on the line of mobile roaming charges. Unfortunately, that took years to be enacted.
Yep. Folks used to call them granny telecom because they were old and decrepit. The only phones you were allowed to connect to their line were the ones you rented from them. And thanks to party lines it was not uncommon to pick up "your" phone and find yourself listening to you neighbors "private" conversation.
> And thanks to party lines it was not uncommon to pick up "your" phone and find yourself listening to you neighbors "private" conversation.
This is a myth. If a party-line was in use then you got an engaged tone.
You could get random crossed-lines with others but that was nothing to do with the party line.
Yep, it absolutely did happen as you describe. I remember it happening to me too, oddly enough, also at my grans house. (We didn't have a phone yet, then, Grandad was important enough at work that they paid for their phone as he was on-call (Shipyard docks, and he might be called out if a ship came in late). I even remember the name of the lady across the road who was the other "party" on the line :-)
The other poster might be younger at not realise what a "party line" is and only ever experienced either Subscriber Carrier Systems on System X exchanges or later DACS lines on digital systems. And not forgetting that any form of party line tended to screw with bandwidth and connection speeds on dial-up modems, especially when they reach the mythical 56K speeds :-)
Not a myth at all. I well remember my father trying to call in his sales figures in an evening, except whenever he picked up the phone he could hear the neighbour's daughter talking to her boyfriend on the shared line.
These lines shared a speech circuit, but with independent ringing for each house by sending ring current between one leg and earth.
Eventually replaced by a multiplex system (WB4000?) where one speech circuit was modulated onto a carrier. Worked for speech, but not for data beyond 300 bps.
This is a myth. If a party-line was in use then you got an engaged tone.
Nonsense. At least here in the US midwest of my childhood, if you picked up a set on a partly line that was in use, you could join the conversation the same as somebody picking up an extension.
A party line was a single line used by more than one subscriber. There were multiple sets connected between that line and ground (exactly like multiple extensions are on a non-party subscriber line).
There was absolutely no physical way for the switch to send a busy tone to one set on the line when there was a call in progress on another set (or sets).
If the switch can simultaneously connect different audio to two different sets, then those two sets are not on a party line. They are on two different lines.
As others have said, it did work like that. Etiquette was that if you heard a conversation, you hung up and tried later.
One aspect was that the exchange equipment had to know which of the two made the call.
The line equipment was configured differently, and you had to press a button which I believe put an earth on one leg, and allocated the call to the relevant subscriber. I think the ring current may have been applied similarly.
If you reversed your line pair, well you can imagine ....
Btw, this was UK in 1960s
Is this an American thing, the party line? I remember the phone we had when I was a child (40 odd years ago). Chunky rotary dial thing, pretty much the only model available but it came in different colours (ooh!). What I remember most are the horribly arcane tarifs which were based upon distance of copper travelled and time of day. You used to get a little booklet of backdoor codes to allow you to call somewhere that was physically nearby but on a different STD because dialling the full number like that was kerching!
How exciting it was when the "InPhone" was launched, which heralded the era of the dinky little phone plug and the idea that you could bugger off down to Woolies and pick a phone you liked the look of (anything, so long as it had a little green BABT sticker underneath).
We had our own phone number. Boarding school had a phone number (name of town plus 348 or 461 depending on junior or senior end!). Never seen or used a party line in my life.
Party Line - the two phone wires ('A leg' and 'B leg' I think was the terminology) were connected to two houses. In one the bell and dial were wired between A leg and ground, in the other they were between B leg and ground. Hence dialling and ringing could be handled separately but the speech circuit was common.
Party Line - the two phone wires ('A leg' and 'B leg' I think was the terminology) were connected to two houses. In one the bell and dial were wired between A leg and ground, in the other they were between B leg and ground. Hence dialling and ringing could be handled separately but the speech circuit was common.
I don't understand. If there were two wires, then why not just hook it up as two completely separate lines?
The party lines I remember were connected to a single line (wire). They were loop-start with make/break dialing (same as a normal subscriber loop). However, the electro-mechanical ringers responded to different ring frequencies. To call somebody else on your party line, you picked up the phone, dialed, and then hung up (the switch wouldn't generate a ring signal if there was a phone off-hook). Since your ringer didn't respond to the ring signal that was being generated, you had no indication when/if somebody answered. You just waited a while and then picked up the phone to see if anybody was there.
You need two wires for the speech circuit, but could get adequate ring signal by using one wire of the pair and an earth return. Each subscriber had their own ring circuit, but they shared the speech circuit.
Wow, that must be some UK-specific set-up. In the US a residential POTS line is a single circuit (loop) with "loop start". There is no separate "ring circuit" and "speech circuit". It's two wires (top and ring). Tip is usually close to ground (it's usually pulled to ground at the CO) and ring is fed with a nominal -48VDC when off-hook. Placing a resistive load between tip and ring takes the loop off hook, causing the switch to allocate a voice slot and generate dial tone on top of the battery voltage. An incoming signal is 90V AC on top of the -48VDC. Once the call is set up, the voice channel is just audio AC on top of that battery voltage.
A PBX to CO connection is also a single loop but there can be some call additional call start/end supervision by grounding tip and ring in a sort of handshake. There's still only one channel for AC (dial, busy, intercept, ring, voice).
"Wow, that must be some UK-specific set-up. "
It's entirely possible that it may be different in different parts of the USA historically.
I seem to remember seeing a Youtube video titled something along the lines of "why telephones sound "wrong" on TV," which highlighted how most films and TV coming out of Hollywood based their on screen telephone ring tones and user interactions on what they were families with and that other parts of the country were different. It's pretty much all moot now anyway as systems are mostly digital and at best are emulating the older analogue systems for the users benefit :-)
Wow, that must be some UK-specific set-up. In the US a residential POTS line is a single circuit (loop) with "loop start". There is no separate "ring circuit" and "speech circuit". It's two wires
I think you misunderstood my comment. The UK system is the same, for a non-party line the ring voltage was sent on the 2 wires of the pair just as you describe, but for a party line two separate ring circuits were created, one from the A-leg and earth, the other from B-leg and earth. There was a single pair shared by the two subscribers, but each could be rung separately.
The party lines I remember were connected to a single line (wire).
Sorry, I bungle that a bit. I should have written "pair" instead of wire, and after re-reading your description a few times, I think I sort of understand what you were describing. I've never heard of that being done in the US.
You have to remember that in the 1950s. there was probably only one or two houses in a street of 100, that had a phone. Most of us had to walk down to the corner, use a phone box and press button A to connect, or press button B to get your 4d (fourpence) back!. As kids we always tried Button B when we passed a phone box! It was surprising how many left their 4d behind.
Yes. It reminds me of the 80s, when it was all publicly owned. British Rail was always crap and Blackpool beach was always covered in sewage, except for a brief period in the 90s. The key problem in both then and now is a lack of accountability for the people responsible for the mess.
ah yes that ...it was shit in the 70s comment.
we could have had fibre to every house in the 90s but BT wouldn't do it post privatisation, even though the factories were literally ready to go, plans were in place.
I've been on the waiting list for fibre to my flat for 6 years so far. So it's not like it's got any better now. I've waited 12 MONTHS for OpenReach to put a sodding internet line into a Datacentre where they already had a POP. And that was 2022!
We've had 20 years of privatised fuckwittery with the trains and BT. Can you name ONE ISP/ telecoms provider that you don't want to throttle? Since BT bought EE, my 5G Speediest is 1/2 what I used to max out on 4G! Where is my promised 1Gbit mobile connection?!
I have full sympathy with those people burning down these poles or setting light to infrastructure. You've seen how someone has come along and popped a pole up across someone's drive. Or just right outside their house with zero consultation.
BT wouldn't do it post privatisation, even though the factories were literally ready to go, plans were in place.
BT wanted to do it, but the government of the day wouldn't let them because it would have been "unfair" to allow them to use their position as incumbent supplier to get a head start over the new entrants.
> Taxpayer-funded state ownership has no incentive for proper investment or performance.
Quite right. That old woman living alone in a village: why should a private enterprise continue to provide phone service just for her? Cut her off and save loadsa money for shareholders, or charge her £100k per month. So what if she needs to call the emergency services if she has a fall or is burgled.
With the switch to digital, that universal service obligation has been watered down significantly. If there's a power cut, your landline dies instantly unless you make your own provisions or or classed as "vulnerable". There is an assumption that everyone has a mobile phone, a workable signal and that the local mast has battery backup (not mandated, or at least not mandated that it must work and the batteries have been checked/replaced as needed, and even then there's nothing in the rules about how long the batteries should last - So, good luck contacting emergency services during a power cut)
That's not really related to the USO, though, since everyone gets the same universally-poor service. USO says that the Telco must provide largely the same service, at the same price, to everyone who asks. There have always been some exceptions in very remote areas, but by and large it is still honoured.
> Don't be an idiot. There's no connection between state ownership and a legal obligation for universal service, as can be clearly seen with the current situation.
Your sarcasm detector needs updating. The reply was highlighting the sweeping generalisation made by the OP.
We're in a village near Hull and KCom have done huge amounts of work to make sure their infrastructure is underground, spending a fortune around 20 years ago to make sure their fibre network was up-to-scratch and arguably well ahead of its time. I've got absolutely no affiliation with KCom, but we're on a new-build site and get full fibre to the premises at 900Mbps for around 45 quid per month including phone line - even before that we had 400Mbps to our 1950's council house with no poles and no visible above-ground infrastructure other than the exchanges. It's always been bullet-proof too - I think in the 5 years we've been here I've had to cycle the power on the router about 3 times. MS3, on the other hand, are causing a complete eyesore, throwing up poles everywhere, including where they partially obstruct people's driveways, where they are so near existing signage that they remove about 50% of the usable area of the footpath, etc. MS3 say KCom are being restrictive with their existing infrastructure and KCom say they're not, but I wish someone would bang their heads together to get it sorted. I personally have no intention of using MS3 given how they've handled the work, and based on local news reports a lot of other people feel the same.
This is Brexit Britain.
Thank you for calling our customer service/complaints department. Unfortunately we no longer have enough staff to pretend to give a toss about your problem, nor enough cash to fix it. Instead you might like to visit our website and click on the icon of the happiness whale. This will play whale song to improve your sense of mental wellness.
The change of government has seen Labour take the 'pretending to care about all this' baton from the Tories. And that is all.
"has seen Labour take the 'pretending to care about all this'"
I don't think there's much else they can do, given what the Tories left behind. At least Labour are smart enough to avoid using the word "bankrupt" as the markets would slaughter them. But reading between the lines of what they have been saying...
"This is Brexit Britain."
Yes, it's a shame everybody is trying so hard to ignore the fluorescent pink elephant in the lurid green tutu doing the can-can in the middle of the room whilst juggling bone china crockery...
"Unfortunately we no longer have enough staff to pretend to give a toss about your problem"
Or they've outsourced their "support" to somewhere where speaking and understanding English is not a requirement...
"nor enough cash to fix it"
I would like to think that blocking access for disabled people (and new mothers, etc) might dua fall foul of some sort of anti-discrimination/accessibility directive, but then I remember how useless the ICO is and have little doubt that the only thing that's ever going to see actual results is if one happens to refer to an obstreperous seven year old by the "wrong" pronoun.
"This is Brexit Britain."
While the Brexit vote did happen before the roll-out in Hull started, it was long before Brexit happened and even longer before any rule changes were implemented. I'd imagine the planning for that roll-out started long before the Brexit vote actually happened. So no, it's fuck all to do with "Brexit Britain".
> "including where they partially obstruct people's driveways"
> It should be legal to chainsaw the things when to do idiotic stuff like that.
> "that they remove about 50% of the usable area of the footpath"
> Isn't this liable to be a problem for disabled people?
Yes, I think some disabled people will struggle to use a chainsaw :-)
"I'm paying $45/mo for 300/300 here"
I'm paying €52/month (or $58) for 2038 Mbit down, 546 up (rural France). Actually that's not entirely true, it is capped at 1GBit per device, I need to pay a tenner extra to have the full bandwidth... but this doesn't bother me as most of my devices use WiFi and that is the slow part.
Kind of mind blowing to go from two and a half megabit (0.7Mbit up) ADSL to fibre.
Lucky you!
I'm in suburban North Carolina, USA. $50/month gets you either a cell-based modem (150 down, 20 up if you're lucky, 30 down, 5 up if you're not) or DSL (10 down, 1 up). Or you could go for Spectrum which is claimed at $50/month "subject to change" and 115 down, 11 up. But the folks I know with Spectrum say otherwise...
It's a typical Government screw-up. They demand something be done quickly but forget that the utility companies have an existing legal right to install poles - even where none previously existed - and then wonder why people are all upset when the company takes the quickest and easiest path.
In my street we have both: poles already existed for telephone put in from the 1930s onwards but NTL, now Virgin Media, were forced to dig up the pavement for cable. Now the fibre people aren't allowed to use or can't afford the usurious access rates Virgin want to charge so they're using the poles again.
I recall chaos at a place I lived way back when. It was built at the end of the 70s. Everything underground. Telephone, electricity, and gas to each house.
Which, perhaps to cut costs, went in really crazy directions across gardens and such. There were manholes on the pavements, but when the lid was up and you look at where the stuff was running, it was like "wait, what?".
Of course, the plans held by the county council showed where all the utilities were supposed to go, not where they actually went.
How we found out? A rather large bang followed by a full evacuation as somebody was digging up their back garden to lay foundations for a conservatory. Thankfully the electrics were above the gas main so they had blown and tripped before the momentum of the digger punched a hole in the gas. Had it been the other way around...
...oh, and of course, for safety reasons they weren't supposed to put the two on top of each other like that. And they should surely have put some sort of plastic mesh stuff down to warn anybody digging that "here be dragons" before anything important got hit.
But most of all they were supposed to put them where the bloody plans said to put them.
Once worked in a place where a contractor came in on a Sunday unannounced to dig a big hole. He was supposed to be working for us, but not on a Sunday, not on his own, and not with a huge digger.
The CCTV was quite interesting.
First he hit a leased line fibre in a large green pipe. He just yanked it up, kinking a large, thick green PVC pipe in half and pinching the fibre inside.
Then he put that to one side and dug further and managed to hit the earths to the main buildings (which were underneath the plastic mesh you describe. Great big score marks and exposed copper that wasn't exposed before). After shaking off the mesh from the digger's bucket, he kept going.
Then he hit a three-phase 100KW power supply line.
We're not sure what happened after that because everything on site went off (including everything behind a UPS) and the CCTV cut out as 400V coursed down cables and earths that it had no business being in.
£15,000 of equipment damage to servers, switches, access control, cameras, all kinds of things spread across the site.
But even without the rest of the CCTV, there was a HUGE scorch mark on the digger's bucket that you couldn't hide. So he hid the digger around the back of the site instead.
We also think he tried to cover the cables back over but never filled the hole even.
Every cable in that pit he made was stretched, scorched, literally torn or the sheathing destroyed by the digger's blades and pulling. And they were layered and he'd just kept hitting things and keeping going even deeper and wider.
The electricity board had to come out and perform emergency repairs with resin-filled joints (and I remember the phrase "27 neutrals have been damaged") at great cost.
We were able to coax the leased line fibre out of the pipe (after cutting the pipe open, because it was that thick) and re-lay it inside another pipe - because that was a £50,000k fibre run and we did not want to have to re-run it.
We had to check all buildings for damaged equipment because so much was blown there were fire hazards everywhere.
And a few months later we had to replace all the power equipment anyway because there was still damage being found to fuseboards, etc. in some of the enclosed buildings at the other end of the site.
One guy and a digger managed to cause months of repair/replacement work, £100,000's of damage and me having to get up on a Sunday to work out why the hell everything IT was off.
It's just luck that stopped him going a few feet to the side and hitting the gas main to several buildings.
It was quite funny when these went up around my house a few years ago. Everyone in the neighbourhood was complaining, but it wasn't clear what the poles were actually for, so I approached one of the engineers.
"It's for broadband."
"What, like mobile?"
"No, no, fibre."
"Oh, fantastic. Carry on!"
"You're the first person we've met who's been happy about it!"
It was actually very impressive how they laid the fibre over the nearby Forth Road Bridge in one continuous 3km strand.
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