I've not seen them next to existing poles but the number that have sprouted in South Birmingham is considerable! Seems Openreach have a target to meet and this is how they'll try to do it in time, looks a right mess though.

I have to say that visiting the UK after a few years away it does seem messy to see so many poles and so many wires hanging in the air.

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.

I'm old enough to remember when the typical Reg headline wouldn't have had the words "of utility poles" in the title.

Indeed, and such a headline would oft have been written by one Alistair Dabbs... Probably part of the reason why the cretinous merkins who are now in charge got rid of him.

I miss those days too, but beware of house rule #6

House rule six... commenters are forbidden from attempting to re-enact the Monty Python's Whicker Island without a signed release? I'm uncertain how this applies to the situation.

And "fibre" would be spelt properly an'all.

Oh well, we'll always have Paris.

Meters and meeters of fiber, four as far as yore I cud sea.

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......

There are streets in my local area which have copper and/or fibre already in ducts. Yet on those streets, new telegraph poles are being erected, which seems a bit bonkers. I have a suspicion that the poles belong to a telco that doesn't want to pay some fee or other to use the ducts....

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.

1. Click on the link to the Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society

2. Scroll down to the Norwich and Norfolk newsletter image

3. Read and... well, in case go "whaaaat?"

I guess you didn't scroll down to "A Nude Linesman in Oz" then...

I still have the TPAS bookmark from the last time El Reg mentioned them, and their sense of humour is excellent.

Should be state-owned and state-supervised, installed and maintained by contractors, licensed to service telcos analogous to vehicle operators.

I presume you don't remember how bad the system was 40 years ago when that was the situation? Taxpayer-funded state ownership has no incentive for proper investment or performance.

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.

Not for my grans house, as I was the one who picked up on the neighbour's call. I think they did improve the "hardware" at some point to stop this though.

Unlike commercial ownership, where it's all about the customer? Have you tried traveling by train or swimming in the seas or rivers around the UK recently?

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.

> 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.

When it could take 6 months to get a new line installed.

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.

" 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?

...900Mbps for around 45 quid per month...

I'm paying $45/mo for 300/300 here in the tech paradise of Massachusetts, USA. [parts of] The Internet were invented here FFS...

Yay, capitalism!

(at least, it's fiber, and no contract)

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.