Openreach Erects Two Southampton Telegraph Poles in Wrong Place

Openreach has apologised after its engineers, which were busy deploying a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network in Southampton (Hampshire, England), accidentally erected two telegraph poles in the wrong location at Seacombe Green, much to the annoyance of local residents. But they’ll soon be moved.

Telegraph poles have a tendency to divide public opinion when they’re erected and, as a result, they remain one of the least loved pieces of modern broadband and phone infrastructure. Nevertheless, they are also a fairly cost-effective solution for upgrading such networks, particularly in areas where the cost of going underground would be too high for a build to be viable.

Such poles are typically built using Permitted Development (PD) rights, which means that they don’t have to go through the usual planning process and can pop up quite quickly, often without residents getting much of a say in the matter. However, such deployments don’t always go to plan, and we have seen some recent examples of poles being placed in the wrong location (here).

In this case, Openreach ended up attracting complaints have they placed two such poles on the wrong piece of grass verge in Seacombe Green, which meant they were much closer to local properties (within a few feet) than if had they been placed a little further away on the grass verge directly at the side of the road (where they were expected to go). Queue the usual complaints about the poles being an “eyesore” and devaluing local homes etc.

A Spokesperson for Openreach said (Southern Daily Echo):

“While preparing to install a new, ultrafast broadband network we erected two poles in the wrong location. We’re going to fix this, and have been working with the local authority which has agreed that we can relocate these poles to a site within the public highway areas at Seacombe Green.

We strive to select and site our infrastructure sensitively but we got it wrong with these two poles and we apologise for any concern caused.”

Admittedly, while such poles may not be universally popular, they do remain quite a common sight across the UK. Indeed, you can often find plenty of people who would be more than happy to accept their deployment if it meant gaining access to a full fibre network. Likewise, there seems to be no shortage of studies claiming to show how the provision of faster broadband networks tend to result in house values going up, rather than down.

In the end it looks as if the residents of Seacombe Green will have to tolerate such poles, even if they’ll now be a few crucial feet further away from their windows than before.