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Banksy Painting Spotted on a BT Openreach Street Cabinet

Tuesday, Oct 14th, 2014 (8:10 am) - Score 5,374

One of BT’s off-duty business improvement coaches, Martin Jones, claims to have spotted an Openreach Street Cabinet in the Gloucester city centre area that has apparently been painted by the well-known graffiti artist, Banksy, whose work can often sell for a small fortune. Uh oh.

Admittedly in some areas there’s no shortage of graffiti to be found on the operators street cabinets although, with the exception of a few BT supported projects (e.g. the designs painted by Hugh Myddleton School), most tend to orientate more towards phallic depictions and.. hmm.. colourful wording, occasionally with a not especially polite reference to local service quality.

By contrast Banksy tends to be better known for making crafty political statements with his art, which against his wishes can often end up selling for tens of thousands of pounds. As a result BT might well be worried that somebody will soon make off with the doors of their humbled street cabinet in Gloucester and indeed the thought also crossed Mr Jones’s mind too.

Martin Jones said:

I was in Gloucester visiting my parents to celebrate my birthday when we drove by the cabinet and I saw the picture. It put a smile on my face and was so impressive that I felt I had to stop and take a photo of it, which I then circulated to some colleagues and managers and it created a lot of interest.

I thought that is quality because he’s even picked out the door that needs painting. I don’t know for sure whether it’s a genuine Banksy picture but there’s no question that it’s in his style and it’s so well done.

If it is a Banksy it could be worth a fortune. I just hope nobody runs off with the cabinet doors – I almost did that myself.”

On the other hand we think the painting could also have been done by another graffiti artist, Beastie, who is also from Gloucester and has been connected with Banksy’s work in the past.

So what kind of statement might old Banksy or Beastie (ughhh) be trying to make? Perhaps he’d just like BT to give the new street cabinet a fresh lick of paint, or maybe it’s a metaphor for wanting to see the cabinet painted out of existence. In either case there’s a good chance that most people won’t care, unless their broadband and phone service ends up going down as a result of damage caused by an enterprising thief of course.

Perhaps in future art he might also like to make reference to the growing problem of crosstalk interference on FTTC lines, which appears to be having an increasingly obvious impact on Internet performance where uptake is strongest. Meanwhile Vectoring technology to fix the issue is still being trialled and hopefully its initial bugs ironed out.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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