There's a lot of old asbestos concrete water pipes still underground. Fine if left alone but best you don't start cutting them.

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.

The other big issue is anything more than about 30 years old is only roughly located at best. Go back much further than that and its even worse.

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?

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.

We had this for a fibre in london - duct in the (middle) of one road, duct in the road with the office on it. 3 metre gap between the 2 systems.

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.

Sounds like someone needs an App, AI powered of course!

(Could've used the Joke icon I suppose.)

You want to go back to those wonderfully efficient days when the government controlled them all? 2 months for a phone line?

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.

If only the gas leaks and water leaks could get together with the power outages to decide to all happen at the same time!

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.

"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.

Why do we ever have to dig it up at all?

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.

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.

s/fiber/fibre/g

We seem to have great difficulty in persuading people to recognise that fact. (note: not 'convincing' people)

Well, it can’t be long before ElReg moves it’s HQ out of Trumpistan…

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.

https://www.free.fr/freebox/freebox-ultra/

8Gig, 60 euros. Telephony and TV services included.

-A.

[1]25Gb for less than 60 quid a month in Switzerland .

Routing and using that bandwidth is actually a challenge :)

[1] https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/

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...

We would have been world leaders were it not for the government. We were set for a full fibre rollout 35 years ago when the plug was pulled.

https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784

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.

OpenWretch's £100 wholesale cost of 1Gbps symmetrical is a bit steep. Alt-nets seem to be able to do this for a hell of a lot less.