Recent UK Storms Damaged 650 of Openreach’s Telegraph Poles UPDATE

Last month was unusual for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that – in the space of just six days (16th to 21st of February) – the UK experienced three named storms (Dudley, Eunice and Franklin). As a result, over 650 of Openreach’s broadband and phone carrying poles were “badly damaged and need replacing“.

The single worst storm out of the three turned out to be Storm Eunice, which generated two rare red warnings for wind – with some gusts reaching up to 122mph – and has been named by the Met Office as the “most severe and damaging storm” to affect England and Wales since February 2014. Admittedly, the impact of such events does depend somewhat upon where you live.

Openreach, like many other broadband and telecommunications firms, suffered a fair bit of damage and disruption to some parts of their network – due to the impact of flooding, snow, major power cuts and high winds. But in this case, we’re going to concentrate on the hot topic of telegraph poles, which have a growing tendency to divide public opinion (examples here, here, here and here).

Opponents of such poles, who frequently complain about their visual appearance (particularly when they’re built into an area that didn’t previously have them), often like to highlight concerns over their durability due to the risk of damage from major storms – a risk that many would suggest is only going to increase due to climate change.

Sadly, getting any solid data on this is hard (e.g. long-term costs – inc. repairs – of overhead vs underground infrastructure), but the recent storms may have given at least a limited indication. Openreach states that more than 650 of their poles were “badly damaged and need replacing” during the storms.

Openreach Statement

“This is some of the most time-consuming repair work we do, as it needs specialist equipment to lift and place the pole, and often we need to gain permission to use safety measures like road closures or temporary traffic lights – which are vital. In some places we’ve had to replace as many as five poles in a row, so it can be very time consuming.”

However, it’s important to put this into some perspective, since Openreach has more than 4 million poles across the United Kingdom, some of which are as much as 15 metres high (8-9m is more common). Put another way, the storms damaged just 0.02% of their overhead network, and that really was some truly exceptional weather. The operator states that their poles are “incredibly robust and tested regularly“, but inevitably some of them do succumb to high winds and falling trees.

The cost to replace a damaged pole is a difficult thing to pin down, due in part to the issues mentioned by Openreach above and the complexity of the damage itself (e.g. did the pole just break or has the foundation been destroyed too). Not to mention that there may be a cost to replace any kit at the top of the pole, if it was damaged.

The poles themselves aren’t very expensive to buy, relatively speaking, but costs do add up once you consider all the labour, admin and permissions needed for installation. Alternative network providers tell us that the cost of just installing a new (not damaged) pole can range from around £550 to over £1,000, which makes them quite cost-effective and not a particular concern for the bean counters.

The other issue is of how long it actually takes to replace a pole, which of course depends more upon the wider issues of road permits/permissions, availability of engineering resources and the level of local damage etc. We’ve seen before how some homes in remote rural areas have been left to wait for 8-12 weeks before repairs in cases of extreme damage (rare), but in urban areas a downed pole may be a matter of hours or just a few short days. We did ask Openreach if they could provide some official figures and are still waiting.

At present, telegraph poles are enjoying somewhat of a renaissance, with many operators using them to help expand the coverage of their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband networks. The impact from the recent storms seems unlikely to change that. Lest we forget that poles continue to be common in some countries where typhoons and hurricanes are a regular occurrence, thus weather alone is not enough to change the argument.

Poles remain a common sight across much of the UK, and you can 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 – via either pole or underground cables – tends to result in house values going up, rather than down.

Naturally, we’d all prefer it if broadband and mobile infrastructure was totally invisible, but that’s not always economically feasible because underground deployments tend to be significantly more expensive. In some areas the choice is thus between either having poles or no fibre at all.

UPDATE 8th March 2022

Openreach informs that, for storm related issues, it is currently taking around 20 days to fix damaged poles. We also found some more details about how Openreach test their poles (here).