then why when all the roads were dug up for the cable push in the 90s wasn't provision made for future increases? It shouldn't be necessary to stick cables with pipes. - which presumably risks cutting off internet signals if sections of another's utility pipe need replacing. Would that be because telewest et al only put it provision for their own interest? (Just like a private company tends to do.)
It was... but telecoms companies also wanted their own assets in place, so they could control their own extortionate pricing and not be at the mercy of those who owned the existing cabling.Originally Posted by ik9000
And yes, future expansion was indeed planned in. You're probably enjoying it right now, in fact.
No more a risk than you losing your clean water supply if it gets impacted by the failure of the sewer, gas mains, electricity lines, phone and fibre lines, road foundations, railways, tubes and anything else that has been laid over or nearby it.
You do realise that most utilities in the UK criss-cross all over each other and when one needs digging up it usually impacts the others?
But yes, it was necessary to put cables inside our pipelines, primarily because there are some areas where you simply cannot dig up the roads, pavements, buildings, etc. Aside from saving weeks of local disruption and the hassle of excavations and reinstatements, trenchless solutions are usually vastly cheaper, too - £2-3k versus a good £35k for dig solutions.
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yes. I also know how difficult it is digging one up and not affecting an adjacent pipe. You're not the only one on here mate. But it is different dealing with adjacent/criss-crossing and something INSIDE/attached to/reliant on the pipe you need to fix/replace.
Well if I'm not the only one on here, mate, then presumably you'll already know you can just brick/form around the fibre cables and avoid damaging them, which presumably then begs the question why you needed to presumably ask in the first place. Far lower a risk than the techniques that affect adjacent assets and even less so using trenchless repairs. All we need now is those expensive German robots and we're absolutely golden.
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If you say so. It's not what we get told in the approved sequences we've had to follow but one site rarely matches the next so maybe you're ahead of the curve. Or maybe being on the utility company side you get to do things differently rather than using the pre-approved caters-to-the-lowest stuff you send out to others. Last one we had a 1m exclusion around all the fibre and even had to get the foundations redesigned accordingly where the route wasn't as the existing plans. It wasn't just a case of sheeting it off then. They (Openreach) vetoed it. Thames are worse with their sewers at it's 3m either side - though that's for permanent works, not for repairing the asset itself.
We then watched someone come and dig the road up a few months later and simply prop the cables on a trestle while they dug underneath them. That really annoyed the team that...
anyway my point is why we didn't lay proper ducts with enough space for mulitple providers not just BT having theirs and ntl (Virgin) having theirs. I've not seen a shared duct in the public realm with anyone else's cables in it, though with the new FTTP companies launching maybe that is changing and I've just not encountered it yet.
Last edited by ik9000; 26-11-2020 at 05:10 PM.
There's rarely anything we do ourselves these days, except the specialist stuff.
You bet your backside, Thames are exceptionally careful about the sewers!
Aside from being by far the largest assets, their sewers are usually the things that went in first with everything being built on top over many decades. Access in the event of a subsequent repair is usually the most problematic of all buried services.
But more than that - A downed fibre cable just means a few businesses and gamers get upset for a few hours, maybe lose a bit of money... a large collapsed sewer can take out several metres of surface width, flood several hundred properties, and even destabilise a train. There are certain key points on the Underground where a sewer breach at any given time would kill several thousand people, minimum, and many times that during the average rush hour.
Not every contractor has high standards. Lanes Group, by any chance?
Several reasons, but ownership and responsibility is probably the biggest driver.
Who owns the duct itself, that everyone is sharing?
Has everyone installed their assets to an agreed standard?
Who gets to decide what that standard is?
Who is thus responsible if something goes wrong?
What good would it be if someone else damaged your asset in the process of getting to theirs in the same duct?
Right now, I could have a works gang on site and ready to go anywhere within our area before midnight... But we'd have to wait several weeks for the council to approve the streetworks. Any other assets within our works Zone of Influence, and you then have to complete RAMS for each of their owners to sign off on. All about covering their responsibilities.
We have shared routing in many situations, especially along the sides and undersides of bridges, or through railway assets.
Each time something needs looking at, the responsibility arguments take months to sort out, and then more months follow as every single party with a vested interest has to agree with and sign off on the interventions you want to do around their assets. They get nothing out of delaying your works on purpose, it just takes that long to process everything.
Can you now honestly imagine ten different telecoms companies, all vying to stuff eachother over on purpose and compete on business, somehow managing to play nice when it came to shared ducts??!!
Nothing would ever get done. Far simpler and cheaper to just let everyone have their own little corner and not get in each other's way.
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but that's the problem - they most definitely do get in each other's way!!! Also everything you've just said is exactly why I'm not sure putting fibre inside the sewer is a great idea... your sewer is becoming the duct in your example. Unlike a duct constructed for the purpose, the sewer has its own independent purpose. When a sewer section needs replacing everything in that segment then needs disconnecting and removing along with it. Unlike a separate duct where it's just a matter of protecting the duct during the sewer work.
But they don't impact on each other's ducts. They have their own, so the demarcation and responsibility is clear.
No, it doesn't. I've only just explained how that works.
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Having a fast and reliable state-run communications network sounds like communism to me! Down with that sort of thing! Won't somebody think of the cronies and brown paper envelopes?
Honestly the state of our broadband in this country is a source of endless despair. We won't have a fully fibered up country this side of 2060. You can bet your house on it. 2033? Yeah, pigs might fly.
The Tories couldn't give a toss one way or the other, unless there's a nice bung in it for somebody.
And BT just want the money. They also couldn't give a flying toss about speeds or reliability or anything except taking your money. That they have to provide some kind of service for that money is a constant source of irritation for them.
We will never again be a world leader in telecommunications. Because we just keep chasing profits and shareholder returns. And it's all calculated for short term return. Investment? What's that?
The Tories aren't interested in state-funded infrastructure projects, unless it's a glorious white elephant that nobody needs and is doomed to utter failure. Hello, HS2 - yes, you can have all the treasury money you want! £200 billion? But of course!
£30 billion on a national fibre rollout? Oh no, that's far too much, and might actually have a lasting benefit and a good return on investment. That would make state funded infrastructure projects look like a good idea, and we're ideologically opposed to anything that makes the state look competent. Which is why we're so completely incompetent! Private sector is best sector!
Actually that £30Bn was found to be closer to £150Bn, but with the added cost of at least £300m per year in maintenance, which would have cost people far more.
As far as the rest of it goes, under Alec Douglas-Home and Ted Heath, the Tories had indeed been investing in public infrastructure, and under the latter had also made it relatively profitable. The problems arose from decisions made by the Labour governments in between, which resulted in the loss of those profits and complete stagnation in funding, borrowing, investment and maintenance.
In at least one industry (ie the one with which I'm most familiar), the degredation was so bad that the UK was prosecuted by the EU for such low quality, and with a threat of severe penalties for further noncompliance, the industry needed a £30Bn investment (£129Bn in today's money). The government didn't have that kind of cash available, so the only real option was private investment.
People seem to have rose-tinted specs when it comes to nationalised infrastructure, forgetting the rolling blackouts, polluted beaches and non-existent trains. Privatisation has its own set of problems, some of which are still caused by government in the first place, but it's generally better than the state-run option, especially given the sorts of clowns that people elect to power these days!
Think about it - Would you really want a clueless toff Jacob Rees-Mogg in charge of the Internet?
Or would you prefer a complete liar like Jeremy Corbyn telling you your internet was running perfectly fine at 90Gbps, when you're barely seeing 700k?
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I'm really not sure where you're getting £150 billion from.
I've seen that figure (albeit in Euros) quoted to fix the whole of Europe's broadband not-spots, and I've seen the same figure in USD quoted to patch up North America's broadband.
I've also seen £150 billion quoted by the IFS as the total cost of all Corbyn's re-nationalisation plans (which included water, leccy, BT, etc).
What I've not seen from any other source than yourself, is £150 billion just to roll out fibre to the UK.
Various articles and opinion pieces in various newspapers and online sources, doing cost breakdowns and analyses, many citing Ofcom and OpenReach reports that assert the cost would be at least £100Bn, and likely closer to 150 based on the spiraling costs of similar (ie government funded, full-fibre rollout) attempts in Australia.
The general assertions seems to be that Labour's initial £20Bn was actually the annual cost of the upgrade, and Labour even had to correct their maintenance cost to reflect the more accurate £580m per year, after some financial bods publicly pointed out the "catastrophic spreadsheet errors" Labour had made.
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Perhaps then you could link to some of the multitude of online sources estimating the rollout cost at £150bn and a further £20bn annually (I thought it was £300 million annually in your last post?)
With costs spiralling so dramatically over the course of just two posts, are you sure you don't work for HS2?
[QUOTE=k9wazere;4275387]Perhaps then you could link to some of the multitude of online sources estimating the rollout cost at £150bn and a further £20bn annually (I thought it was £300 million annually in your last post?)[quote]
Maintenance was indeed £300M in my last post. I hadn't spotted that Labour has since officially revised the cost, which is even higher now.
The 20Bn was Labour's initial assertion of the cost, which people think was actually the annual cost to the promised 2030, hence the total being somewhere between £100Bn and £150Bn.
So with current figures, you'd be looking at around £100Bn install, plus £580M annual maintenance.
https://theconversation.com/economic...alistic-127256
https://fullfact.org/election-2019/l...d-maintenance/
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-br...-idINKBN1XP0NZ
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/e...nsen-s20nvjltw
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/ge...warning-363689
And plenty others like it.
So a basic £100Bn, assuming average cost per installation, but not factoring in things like inflation or any non-standard installations, the latter of which would apply to many of the more rural and remote locations. Bearing in mind the absolute earliest BT reckoned anyone could manage this was actually 2038, so an additional 8 years of cost on top of what Labour proposed... But more importantly, this would be nationalised, which means acquiring various companies along the way, which means you have purchase prices to consider, as well as all the associated responsibilities and liabilities like pension funds and any debts that come with the ownership.
Given that they also wanted to nationalise my own industry, and just my company alone would have cost them £7Bn (and change), I think £50Bn for all the comms elements is a very conservative (pun intended) underestimate.
It's possible I do work for HS2 and am completely unaware of it, seeing as we've voted some absolute nutters into government lately...With costs spiralling so dramatically over the course of just two posts, are you sure you don't work for HS2?
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As someone said: employ clowns, don't be surprised when you get a circus.
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