Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes Network operators laying fiber infrastructure could cut their costs by taking advantage of "thousands of miles" of abandoned infrastructure, including gas and water pipes, according to a firm that tracks such things. AssetHUB, which describes itself as a marketplace and trading platform for assets and infrastructure, claims …
All this "abandoned assets there for the taking" stuff dramatically over-simplifies the suitability for re-use. In addition to asbestos cement, there's other considerations such as the fact that water and gas mains tend to be 750mm or deeper, which is twice the normal depth as telecoms kit. Not too much of a problem when slipping a fibre through, but it means deeper digging for every property connection, plus more chance of conflict and damage to other infrastructure (live gas, water, electricity). Other considerations include things like older water or gas pipes often run under the road making access slower and more expensive (road closure permissions and temporary lights). Or that abandoned infrastructure is typically old and cracked or rusted, so has no guarantees on structural integrity.
We've been here before, with daft ideas to thread fibre through water pipes or through the sewers. For specific local situations it can and does work, but systemically nope. The best option is to bite the bullet and lay infrastructure according to the guidelines of the National Joint Utilities Group, not farting about to save a few pennies and then create complications and on costs that'll be an issue for decades to come.
Mileage may vary.
I worked with a major utility company when they were first adopting GIS, and they actually had a team of people going out and surveying every single one of their assets ready for digitising into the GIS. The quality of their data was - and, I believe, remains - very good
Def not Scottish water....theyve been *trying* to locate drain pipe routes for about 2 years now so they can be relocated to allow a ramp to be built so another ramp doesn't end in a staircase (yes seriously....public agency 1 built a great wholly accessible wheelchair ramp...then didn't tell the council, who then missed it was there, leading to this wheelchair ramp having 5 stairs at the far end....
Some moaning to the council got the works approved but Scottish water have been holding it all up for knocking on 2 YEARS now....
Pretty much, yes, but add in that the ducting will normally be colour coded to indicate who the owner is: Aka who you need to call if there's a service 'hit'. And such ducting may just be blocked off but still attached to the main ducts (particularly for gas and water where you don't want to risk leaking).
So, using 'abandoned' ducting comes with a whole heap of problems. Not least being if the original owner turns up to do the repairs they've been 'planning for the x years' as there's a new estate being build that the 'abandoned' ducting could be fixed up to supply.
Oh, and there's already stories* of some enterprising groups who decide to use some 'abandoned' duct without checking it's okay, for the owners to turn up and find all this cabling in their duct that shouldn't be there... and promptly rip it out, then go hunting for whoever broke into their ducting so they can bill the miscreants for the damage done and repairs needed to restore the ducting to a usable condition.
*there usually are such stories, and much like rumours, they take on a life and authority of their own.
Or we could just build roads that are designed to have a variety of utility ducts run in parallel for the entirety of their length that do not require digging up the road to access them and where they can be shared by whoever needs to use them, available at a variety of depths, follow every road, service every property serviced by roads, and have tons of spare capacity for future usage for when we pipe, I don't know liquid selenium to every property or whatever.
But no, we just never actually do that, or if we do we make it pathetic and requiring digging up the road all the time, which involves a ton of legal permissions to do things with it.
How has every road not just got a utility section under it that you can easily tap into from every road junction?
"How has every road not just got a utility section under it that you can easily tap into from every road junction?"
Age, mostly.
Most of the UK's urban road network (some of the New Towns excepted) is 100+ years old for the modern suburbs, and several hundred years old (or more) for the city centres. Utilities have been added over time, as technology and living standards have changed. Selected supplies of piped water, probably then sewers, then probably a more extensive water supply, then gas pipes, then electricity, then 'phone lines, then cable TV, now fibre.
No one thought to create a utilities supply culvert when the first services went in, in part, I suspect, because no one imagined all the future technologies, and probably also in part because there wasn't so much traffic on the roads that digging them up was thought to be too disruptive.
Now, no one wants to pay to create an efficient utilities trench, let alone the cost and disruption of then relaying all those utilities - including the need to re-attach all the connections to every property being served.
@Leed D: Occasionally something like this is done for a special reason, but there's good reasons that it isn't the norm.
Essentially, such a duct needs to go under the pavement (as NJUG guidance recommends for new buried utilities). Said duct needs to accessibly accommodate electric, gas, water, and telecoms so it needs to be big, something like 1.5m deep and 1m wide minimum. There's other possible services to make things more complex in built up areas such as heat networks, and SCADA cabling for things like traffic lights and traffic control sensors, and additional power circuits for street lighting.
It'll need some formwork, say concrete sections, and a concrete lid capable of being removed but supporting an HGV. Such things are easily available, weighing about 3-5 tonnes per linear metre. So that's a big trench to be dug, and a lot of heavy and expensive concrete sections - and importantly, you'd still have all the buried service connections to properties on either side of the street, as well as a rat's nest of cabling and pipes inside the duct. This duct needs to freely self drain as it's below street level, so needs to be tapped into surface water drainage with backflow prevention, and pumped drainage where the ground is flat or if there's a local dip (because unlike a drain, a shared services duct can't be buried low enough to keep a steady 1 in 40 gradient). It also needs need natural or pressure ventilation, otherwise a gas leak tuns the duct into a linear bomb. If it's easily accessible as implied, then it's also vulnerable to vandalism and cable theft (even when the wires are live), so utilities put up with that risk or spend more money on duct monitoring. With the best design and will, sometimes the drainage and ventilation precautions will fail, then the duct becomes an enclosed space containing live electric cables that could be flooded with "clean" water, with surface drainage water, or with raw sewage, and have a leaked methane environment, or from standing dirty water a hydrogen sulphide environment. This is before the problem of rats is noted - not only would a nominally dry duct become a rat superhighway, but it would also enable them to chew at plastic pipes or electrical insulation.
The idea of a shiney clean multi-utility service duct is a lovely concept, and in a very few situations is can and does work. But the reality is that it would be vastly more expensive than direct burial for general use, and every bit as problematic afterwards just in different ways. It would still often need road closure permissions and traffic control to access it, because utilities would have to close the pavement to access the duct, and after all that there's still the sewers not included in the duct, or the need to excavate to a problematic buried service line.
They put a new roundabout in on a duel carriageway near me. Digging it they found a cable.
Unmarked. BT (openreach wouldn't have that name for a year or so afterwads) were called. "No ours:"
Finally someone called NTL:Telewest/Virgin... "Yeah, thats the primary feed from the head station to that town, cut that and you kill all our services".
“ How has every road not just got a utility section under it that you can easily tap into from every road junction?”
Cost.
Remember this is the UK, where housing estate developers will do anything to cut costs. That’s why the majority of new houses have a single centre of ceiling light fitting, minimum number of electrical sockets etc. remember the reason for ceilings being lower is primarily due to it requiring a few less courses of bricks.
So for it to happen the building regulations ie. The government would need to mandate it and engage inspectors to ensure it actually happens.
Well, if there is this fabled abandoned infrastructure, then legally it is the responsibility of the owner. However, given poor record keeping for underground assets, proving who that is may be difficult. There will certainly have been no maintenance, but the consequences of failure are at most a modest sinkage of the road surface a pipe collapses. But that assumes the pipe hasn't already collapsed and the road repaired, or that it wasn't filled with cement and can't collapse.
The pipes that cause problems when they fail are active water or sewer pipes - so sewers tend to be big and would cause a road collapse if they went, a water main can cause modest sinkholes or sometimes spectacular surface blow outs. But a pipe carrying nothing, not so much.
"poor record keeping" this was demonstrated to me when they did work on the mains feeder down the road next to my house - I live in a corner terrace. I came home to no power, and no warning.
I spoke to the guys doing the work, foreman was called over, opens his map, and it shows my power being fed though the front of the house from road X.
In reality, the feed comes in the side of the house, half way along it's original length, from road Y.
This map dated from the mid 60s. It was corrected in 2014.
I know some old hydraulic power pipes have been used for fibre and I think some of the old Rediffusion ducts were also repurposed. There have been examples of fibre being laid along railway lines, high voltage power lines and through sewers. I suspect the bigger problem is joining up these islands of infrastructure to each other - and to the end users.
It's one of the classic complaints people have against public works - all in favour of the benefits but shouldn't it be better organised? Fix all the utilities at the same time when you dig up a road rather than repeatedly dig it up, reuse conduit that's already there and so on. It sounds positive
The problem these days is co-ordination. Because all our utilities are provided by seperate private companies there's no common driver to carry out work at the same time.
A friend worked for one of the electricity companies, and he was saying it took upwards of half a day just ringing round the various differnt owners to find out who to talk to when trying to dig up a particular bit of road. That's before you start getting the permits and co-ordination sorted.
Whereas today with the private sector doing it all, I've been waiting, let me see, 7 years for fibre. And still no sign.
The private sector keeps refusing to do it unless they gets shedloads of taxpayer money, and even then can't be arsed to actually deliver.
And even then, once they've done it, they have to pay back some of it because it turns out more people sign up than they thought (see BDUK phase 1 gainshare - yes I know that was FTTC)
It's regulations too. A friend does project planning for an electricity DNO - he often gets asked "while you've got that trench open, can you stick in a fibre for us?" to which the answer is "I could. We'll be putting our own fibre in anyway. But I'm not allowed to do it for you."
It's seen as state aid as the DNO can bypass a lot of red tape for such things. That's before getting into things like charging for it. And if they were to do it, how many other projects would get delayed on the basis of "we'll wait and see who'll dig the road up next"?
Yup - back when I was working for a cable company, we kept trying to do cooperative works to cut down disruption but other utilities didn't want to share their trenches. Main reasons were about who would be responsible for reinstatement and maintenance (yes, we offered to split the costs, but that wasn't swaying them). So inevitably we'd go dig up the ground for someone else to turn up and dig it back up (usually without telling us they'd done so) for there to be a problem, we'd go out to take a look, see someone else has dug up the ground, report that to highways and then get into a bun fight over who was actually responsible (them as the rule is it's the responsibility of the last company to disturb the land). Yes, we were that careful and honest: We were building our reputation and there were enough dirty tricks going on to besmirch the company name that we didn't need to give those behind that any legitimate claims against us. So no cutting corners from us, thanks. That was mostly... a particular big named , well established rival... (and no, not Virgin media: They didn't exist at that point).
There were all sorts of crazy ideas as to how cooperation might work better, and how we could cut down on digging up roads and footpaths, but they never got far: Always some reason why it wouldn't work.
As to phoning around: Right, so all the ducting should be registered with highways so there's a central record of where things are. BUT those records aren't (or at least were not) kept up to date by the other utilities, so you have to call them to check and then hope their records are correct. Else you get what one of our teams encountered: A mains power cable half imbedded in the tarmac of the footpath. Seriously, it wasn't in the right place, let alone at the right depth. That one could have been rather... nasty... and yes, the cable did get broken cutting power to a lot of properties, but we 'got away with it' because the cable wasn't properly buried, to the right depth and the location wasn't correctly recorded or marked out when we'd asked. Not sure if the crew were supposed to check for undeclared cables at the time - know I've seen surveyors out with hand-held devices checking footpaths which I guess is a check for shallow cables, but I could be wrong - not been in telecoms for >cough< years.
"Not sure if the crew were supposed to check for undeclared cables at the time"
Depends on how long ago this was, I guess, but any activity that breaks ground should be checking for sub-surface utilities through various means: online 'dial-before-you-dig' services - they used to actually be telephone services when dinosaurs walked the earth and the internet didn't exist; utility records and on site scanning - typically CAT and Genny, which is probably what you've seen (it's been standard kit for at least 30 years).
There is now firm guidance on this in the form of a document known as PAS128, which is not-quite a British Standard, first published in 2014 (current version 2022).
If you have anything to do with directing people to make holes in the ground, this document should be required reading.
... the local council contacted all the utilties before a large block of flats went up in our road. The council dug the entire pavement up, and allowed all the utilities to do their various things, BT, Gas, Water, Sewer, surface water etc. Then when it was reinstated back to flat hardcore, the council themselves resurfaced the entire pavement.
2 weeks later Videotron came along and dug a zigzag trench through the nice shiney new pavement for the cable tv.
The council were NOT happy
But some things are obvious. Like the old water main near me that is constantly leaking, but they'll only fix 2m at a time as the other bits might not actually be leaking and if they are it's below the threshold anyway. So we have water constantly seeping through the road and (this time of year) causing potholes. The whole length clearly needs replacing, which would undoubtedly be cheaper to do in one hit, but the water company won't do that - presumably the next repair will be in someone else's tenure as this year's mangler moves on with their bonus for saving costs.
But some things are obvious. Like the old water main near me that is constantly leaking, but they'll only fix 2m at a time as the other bits might not actually be leaking and if they are it's below the threshold anyway.
That's like potholes in roads. If a pothole is bad enough it'll be fixed but the one right next to it that is not yet bad enough will be left until it deteriorates to the same point it then gets repaired but the original one is ignored as it hasn't yet become serious enough. There's a couple near me that seem to alternate with each being fixed in turn then back around in a cycle.
But I'd better stop there otherwise I might get into a rant about the Tesco roundabout on Ruscote Avenue in Banbury.
And then no one can fix it because the water company says it's a health and safety hazard to work in a trench with the possibility of live electricity and gas, the gas company won't work with live electricity or in water, and the electricity company won't work in a situation with live gas or with a trench full of water.
Read of a situation where an electricity pole in Canada was used to run a fibre network over. Someone crashed into the pole, breaking it and causing both electricity and fibre cables to snap. The electricity company sent a worker who refused to go anywhere near the site as there could be high-powered lasers shooting around all over the place, and the ISP sent a tech who refused to go anywhere near the site as there could be live electricity in the broken wires.
It took hours of phone calls and the delivery of laser-sensing equipment to site from another tech from a larger office for both sides to adequately reassure the other in triplicate that no, really, our kit is not live and your guy can approach and get to fixing it, all whilst the town was without electricity or internet.
"It's one of the classic complaints people have against public works - all in favour of the benefits but shouldn't it be better organised? Fix all the utilities at the same time when you dig up a road rather than repeatedly dig it up, reuse conduit that's already there and so on. It sounds positive"
Unfortunately the infrastructure life varies, so not everything needs fixing at the same time, and there's many reasons why you might need to renew or replace an asset that a few years ago was deemed perfectly adequate. We could have a national programme to systematically and proactively replace all underground wires and pipes at fixed intervals, the cost of this would be immense, about £15k per property served every time you did it (I won't bore you with the estimates, but they're based on some knowledge on my part and regulatory reporting). And even if brand new, assets are still subject to occasional digging needs - gas leaks, water leaks, sewer collapse, blocked ducts, collapsed chambers, need for new capacity.
"Have service access to it all via manholes and keep it away from the travelling surfaces so they don't wear and degrade and have to be accounted for every time something needs a resurface."
Hold on, your work is responsible, complicated, requires skills and experience, yes? Well the same is true of the engineers, planners and technicians who design, build and maintain electricity, water and gas infrastructure. Be assured that if it were so marvellously simple, cheap and obvious then those people (including me in years gone by) would have leapt on the concept. And nowadays, where almost all last mile infrastructure for new developments is being built competitively and owned separately from the relevant distribution system, any fixed thinking by incumbents is routinely questioned but nobody does this.
Maybe you're younger than me, but I remember an old television advert showing how utilities were working together to reuse the same hole while it was dug up. 1980s at a guess. Why they were advertising this I have no idea. Maybe it was to try to boost their PR image, which was no better then than it is now. After water, power and gas had cooperated, a hearse turned up.
It is hardly surprising that water, power and gas don't cooperative. Water needs hard lines that run under pressure and generally pretty far down, gas lines are (somewhat) flexible and under more pressure. Electric lines are just insulated wire. The problem is that of them will react well when it contact with one of the other.
By contrast all communication stuff whether coax, POTS, ethernet or fiber are all insulated wire/glass and none create a life safety danger if they come in contact with each other. They could all be shoved through a single conduit. Here in 2025 no one is going to be doing any new deployments that are anything but fiber so you could deploy one decent sized (say 3") conduit and support plenty of competition fiber-wise.
Obviously it doesn't make sense to dig up existing stuff to retrofit but any new developments could be required to have that common conduit, any major construction that replaces utilities could require it, and over a few decades it would become the rule rather than the exception. The common conduit would be considered municipal property, with the cost of running it split among the companies using it, and there would be some fees paid to the city by a company wishing to add their fiber to existing conduit so there aren't any "free riders" who wait for it to be laid to save money.
Well strictly speaking there would be no technical problem having a person-sized duct with all the services in it - electric cables are insulated, gas pipes are designed for the pressure they hold, water pipes ditto. And there is an example - in Paris city centre, there is an ornate series of passageways under the streets, nicely tiled, and with street names and house numbers so you know where you are. I vaguely recall (from seeing a bit about it on telly) that it even carries the sewer.
The downside is that suddenly your telecoms people need certifying not only for handling low voltage phone lines and fibre, but also "mains" voltage just in case they come across a less than perfect electricity cable. And everyone has to be qualified and equipped for working in confined spaces - so Ex-rated equipment, permit system, buddy system, and all that goes with that.
As to your other observation - all we're going to be deploying now is fibre, yes that's correct. Both Fibrus and Openretch have been busy* round our town, and both have needed some new ductwork (obviously some of the routes OpenRetch follows don't suit Fibrus's needs), and the duct sizes they've been putting in are quite small.
* Got an email on Sat to say Openretch are lit, so just waiting to see if Fibrus will give me a clue as to timescale (some properties nearby are lit, but not us yet) before I make a decision who to go with as I ditch Plusnet.
Openreach said it is now offering a symmetric 1Gig @ £100, this is a joke and almost as bad a Vermin Media 1.2d/100u @ £39? 2Gigu/200d @ £70? depends on deal.
We are so far behind other countries, we should by now be using symmetrical speeds in the multi-Gig if OR and VM etc had invested in infrastructure and not helped ISP milking customers.
25Gb for less than 60 quid a month in Switzerland.
Routing and using that bandwidth is actually a challenge :)
2 years ago I was offered 4Mbit and refused.
I moved house and was offered 25Mbps.
A year later I changed to another ISP and they promised 45Mbps but didn't deliver.
Their engineers came out and got me up to 75Mbps.
Ironically, I started within the M25 and by the bottom I'm in the rural countryside miles from anything.
Roll on literally ANY rival to Starlink that doesn't have a Nazi at the helm. Come on Project Kuiper...
8Gig, 60 euros. Telephony and TV services included.
Yeah, but it's with Free. I used to have ADSL with them, supposedly 3MBit/s, the best my old phone line could supply, but at peak times they throttled it down to less than 15kbit/s. They denied doing so, and anyone who publicly claimed that they did so got threatening letters from their lawyers, but all 10 of the people in my office who used them reported the same issue at 5pm every night. Dialup was faster for email. My guess is that their advertised 8Gbit/s has "up to" in the small print, and probably drops to something below 8Mbit/s at busy times due to contention. I dumped them and went back to Orange, more expensive & slower headline numbers, but far, far, more reliable.
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“We are so far behind other countries, we should by now be using symmetrical speeds in the multi-Gig if OR and VM etc had invested in infrastructure and not helped ISP milking customers.“
No, not really, believe me I know lots of people from various countries, and all of them will say how bad internet access is in their country and how much better, faster and cheaper it is here. It depends where you live, yes? Of course it’s easy to say, oh I can get 10 Gbit/s for the equivalent of 20p a month - maybe, is that everywhere or just in a small area? Is most of the country stuck with a single supplier who charges monopoly rates for sub standard speeds?
Openreach said it is now offering a symmetric 1Gig @ £100, this is a joke and almost as bad a Vermin Media
This is what happens when you let the marketing people have any say in things. The cost of the local infrastructure is the same whether you take a basement level slow service (which is barely better than I can get with FTTC) or the top end service. There IS a difference in terms of backhaul and peering, but I strongly suspect that by the time you average everything out it makes no difference. Lets face it, very few people will actually be able to keep a high speed link busy for much of the time - so I suspect the difference between giving everyone (say) 150M max uplink vs 1G as standard will be minimal if anything.
For those of us who've been in the industry for some time, BT have a history of pricing and/or restricting things to protect their more expensive offerings. At one time, "leased lines" (a.k.a. KiloStream or MegaStream) were BT's cash cow - I worked at a place where we paid £500/mo/link for just 64kbps from our head office to a satellite site (and there were two sites, so £1k/mo total) in 1990s money. Most fo the time the traffic rate was very low - user presses a key, it goes by Telnet up to our computer, computer sends some text back (2kbytes max for a full screen). So the "D channel signalling" option on ISDN and dial up a 64k B channel when required would have done us and cost a lot less (with the D channel, it would have taken the background traffic that on occasions caused us to keep an international call up over a weekend*). But guess what BT didn't support on ISDN that was standard in many countries - yup, D channel signalling was well and truly crippled by a combination of technical and pricing restrictions to make it useless and thus make us keep our leased lines (for a while at least).
When ADSL came along, that too was restricted - for us it was simply a case of "nah, won't be doing your exchange" until some altnet hinted it was looking at it, and then we got done to keep the altnet out. Needless to say, as soone as we could get ADSL, the leased lines went and we fired up a VPN.
When VDSL (a.k.a. FTTC) came along, I was working at an IT services outfit, and it was very obvious that they weren't doing cabinets with a predominantly business service area. So we had clients where the owners had better connectivity at home than they did in the office - and for some we had to go Annex-M to get higher uplink speeds on ADSL to make their VPNs work at a half decent speed.
* Oh yes, that "ISDN channel up all weekend" problem.
At some point we gained a couple of offices abroad - and as an interim measure did dial-on-demand ISDN to get them connected. It was mostly OK - the staff came in in the morning, opened a terminal (by this time, a program on a desktop rather than a green-screen terminal), and the ISDN dialled up. If no-one was working, the link dropped. But we had some staff, at one of the offices, who would realise they didn't want the long print job they'd just sent who would just turn off the printer and say nothing. So our unix box kept asking (over IP) the print server if it was ready for more data, and it would reply that it wasn't. The low level of back and forth prevented the line dropping so it stayed up all weekend. I think it was only when the staff concerned were threatened with getting the bill that they stopped doing it and would ask for the job to be cancelled. I could probably have done something to detect and deal with it - but back then I didn't have the programming skills I've gained since.
When they're replaced with plastic isn't the normal solution to run the new stuff using the old as a route, either as a straight push through inside the old or using a tool to fracture the old apart & pull the new through the space?
At least that's how I've seen any replacements being done in recent years. Quite a neat process how they manage to incrementally install the new pipe & connections without having to shut it all off.
That's a lot of 'disused' infrastructure that's abandoned in place (as in the metal is still down there) yet still fully occupied by its replacement. If they blindly assume upgraded == old disused available then the estimates will be wildly out.
"When they're replaced with plastic isn't the normal solution to run the new stuff using the old as a route, either as a straight push through inside the old or using a tool to fracture the old apart & pull the new through the space?"
Pretty often it was indeed that. In a former life a long time ago I signed off millions of quid to such schemes in the water industry, and first preference was always trenchless techniques like slip-lining (where an MDPE plastic main is fed through inside an existing steel or cement pipe) or pipe-bursting (that fracturing of which you speak). As a rule, if you're digging to install a larger bore main that you couldn't put in with trenchless techniques then the preference would be to remove decommissioned pipe if at all possible, and in some cases where pipes were left in the ground they were filled with cement based materials to avoid further collapse.
There are some abandoned pipes, and the article mentions 12,400 miles of abandoned water mains, doesn't seem unreasonable against the circa 400,000 miles of water pipe in use but there's that question of whether the abandoned pipes are in a location where (a) there's no PIA options with Openreach, (b) where there's actually a need to lay fibre. Older pipes being often under the middle of the road and deeper than required means that for local distribution the additional connection costs could very quickly become prohibitive. The report does of course originate from a company hoping to become a data intermediary in such matters, so treat this news with whatever scepticism you deem appropriate.
So what happens when they put a fibre run through a gate valve, and roadworks shuts the valve while turning off others?
Because you know that will happen.
Or "That water main has been disconnected for years, water authority confirms, no problem if we cut it out."
Interactive plumbing is best left to the Blue Man Group imho.
Because here in the US, unused pipes mostly don't exist.
When they get replaced, they get dug up. My street had a sewer replacement a few years back, they dug up the old pipes and put in new ones. Water supply lines were replaced at the same time, lots of digging, lots of new pipes, the old pipes went in a dump truck. They used temporary lines to keep the water and sewer flowing while it was going on, my water was out for a few hours during the whole process. They put an epoxy liner in the sewer main a few streets away in the bits they didn't dig up. The only thing unused there are the trolley tracks, they're still mostly in place under the middle of the street, but you can't use trolley tracks to carry fiber, they're not hollow.
They don't bother with digging for power or comms anyway here, it's all up on poles. It's cheaper initially, but it's a maintenance headache, they're constantly replacing them. The water and sewer lines were about a hundred years old, underground lasts longer.
Good luck with that.
I spent time working with a water jetting team and our biggest earner was working for BT. Pretty much every duct they wanted to pull fibre through was full of mud and blocked somewhere along it's length. Even the underground junction rooms which can run to 100s of square metres were full to the brim with mud and road dirt.
Most blockages were dealt with by digging up the affected area because the ducting had collapsed or been crushed by third party works.
What's needed is a concerted effort to install new ducting that's fit for purpose.
Yes, because their business model is build like hell whilst the private equity money lasts, and discount the consumer pricing below cost to demonstrate strong takeup by customers. Sadly there's not a single altnet covering its cost of capital, most are losing money hand over fist. When you break out Virgin Media's accounts it's apparent that they probably aren't covering their cost of capital on broadband (the high margin TV bundles for existing customers enable them to do this), and that'll be true for altnets - the simple maths of cost per property passed, cost to serve, market price, churn rates etc means that any sustainable future requires far more market share then they'll be able to sustain long term. The only exception to this is in pockets where VM and Openreach fibre aren't available, and there's no overbuild by multiple altnets fighting each other.
By that I mean lead (Pb). String the fiber through the lead water service lines into the customer's domicile. Get caught up in even MORE bureaucracy... Maybe the electrons will pick up the lead particles and feed them straight to our brains via our eyeballs. Never mind the water department coming by in a year or three tearing all of it out preventing my free speech on Xitter...
It's got to be worth a shot at least.
BTW whatever happened to shared mapping of service, pipes and ducts in the roadway?
I know it was running slow but IIRC they did get it done in the end..
Something along the lines of "XYQ power are going to be making a hole at 51° 27' 18.51" N, 0° 59' 25.86" E* Thurs 6/3/25 for the whole day. Anyone else need access?"
*Reading railway station in case you wondered.
> Every year, a percentage of older utility infrastructure needs to be replaced with modern plastic piping, leaving the abandoned assets in the ground
Although it might not matter that an old water pipe was abandoned because it had a leak¹, you have to wonder how big a state of disrepair all these unused subterranean tubes are in.
And the same question can be asked of all the other ones, too.
[1] Though if that allows an ingress of water it could still make the pipe unusable.(Especially if the fibres carry floating point data)
1. Why does anyone at home need 1Gbps broadband other than to brag?
2. The problem with old infrastructure conduits is if they are not being used, they are likely blocked. They have been up and down my street countless times trying to get fibre down old routes and years later I'm still unable to access! Or is the fibre for something else? All the cameras to check on us?
Just to hammer the point home we have had 3 years of disruption to our already pathetic road "network".
When I started my Fibre connected journey just over 2 years ago I chose a service from an ISP that used Openreach, so my copper wires were removed from the telegraph pole and substituted with Fibre.
BT then realised that the fibre cable that serves the estate built some 30+ years ago (off the end of my then cul de sac) didn't have a duct from a manhole up the street to a third down the street, which still has no cables (Duct 1) as existing cable just buried in ground at about 2 feet.
CityFibre came along and ducted the street and due to poor service from Openreach I have now on contract expiry switched to them and am happy so far (Duct 2)!
Before I switched however Virgin Media came along in put in a cable duct (Duct 3) twice the size of Openreach or CityFibre!
Pity the gas and water co employees who will now have the maze of conduits to work around if they have a fault. Luckily my electricity still comes off the poor old telegraph pole!
When the University of Iowa rolled fiber optics (in the early 2000s), inexplicably they totally ignored the steam tunnels that ran between every building, big enough to probably drive a small car through. I don't think they had the term urbex (uirban explorer) yet but people commonly got into them, miles of them. Since they were partially for civil defense/bomb shelterr use originally fingers of the steam tunnels run to grocery stores and other locales all over town apparently.
So instead thery dug up streets and even damned the river so they could dig a new tunnel across the river, instead of using the steam tunnel that already crossed the river. I mean. if they thought they were unsafe they could have still dragged fiber with a remote control car (toy size, I'm not picturing them running a remote controllled Toyota throiugh there LOL.)
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