Pole Complaints Prompt Toob to Exclude Fleet Streets from Fibre Rollout
Network operator and UK gigabit broadband ISP toob, which is currently in the process of investing £7.5m to deploy a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across 19,000 homes in the Hampshire (England) town of Fleet, has removed several streets from its plan after locals objected to their use of poles.
Construction of the town’s new network began last summer, and the first customers are expected to go live sometime this year. The move was initially welcomed because, at present, Virgin Media are the only gigabit-capable network operator with any significant coverage. But Openreach do have some small patches and F&W Networks were also spotted building in the town, although the latter seems to have subsided following recent events.
However, residents in some areas soon began objecting after the operator began deploying 9m high wood poles to run a good chunk of their overhead fibre, which is not exactly the most popular method of infrastructure delivery these days. But they are also using a fair bit of existing underground duct, where available.
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Despite being a common sight across the UK, a fair few people find poles ugly and often bemoan the lack of prior direct consultation. Such issues can also become particularly emotive when they’re deployed into areas that haven’t previously had them before, or where too many poles are already deemed to exist.
According to ForFleetsSake, these are precisely the sort of issues that residents have been raising in several parts of the town, such as along Tavistock Road, Dukes Mead, Glen Road and Dinorben, among others. In recent months, there has also been mounting pressure from the local MP and some councillors. As a result, toob has now decided to scale back their roll-out plans in the town, which will exclude several areas from the new full fibre network.
A spokesperson for toob said:
“Following feedback from residents, toob have made the decision to not deploy here at this time.
We had done community engagements visiting constituents in the roads below during November and December before proceeding with our planned new poles deployment, however it is clear that the people we spoke to were not representative of the views of the areas, and there we will be placing the areas on hold following wider constituents’ concerns. toob has now made a decision not to deploy poles supporting our full-fibre to premise (FTTP) broadband at this time in the following roads below.
This area will be reviewed in future and based on the level of interest and acceptance we may look to proceed. But, for now, no poles will be installed in the above location. This also includes 116 to 180 Tavistock Road, The Oaks, Perry Drive and 72 to 110 Dukes Mead.
Further to this, our halt on works in the Dinorben area includes Dinorben Avenue, Dinorben Close, Denning Close, Ridley Close, Badgers Close, Chinnock Close, Grantley Drive, Carthona Drive, Hartleaf Close.
These above areas and roads will be reviewed in future and based on the level of interest, and acceptance we may look to proceed.
We are a local company, and we have no interest in alienating any part of local community.
This area will be reviewed in future and based on the level of interest and acceptance we may look to proceed. But, for now, no poles will be installed in the above location at this time. “
It’s worth noting that poles, despite their detractors, are quick and cost-effective to build – enabling new full fibre networks to grow into areas that might otherwise not be economically viable – boosting competition and coverage. Not to mention that they’re less disruptive (avoiding the noise, access restrictions and damage to pavements of trenching) and can be deployed into areas where there may be no space or access to safely put new underground cables.
Naturally, those who had wanted to gain access to toob’s faster and cheaper network, will be very disappointed. But toob’s approach is understandable, given the current animosity of some toward poles and the danger that this could lead to wider resentment of their plans. Network operators often have to walk a very difficult line on such issues.
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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 Linkedin.
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Usually it’s the older generation that do the complaining, by objecting, they don’t realise they’re actually screwing over the next generation.
We have poles already and with out them we would not have basic telephone or power. My area has alot of retired people and quite a few are quite happy with the work OR are doing to bring fttp to us.
Its typically those who have had no poles before that are complaining.
Makes you wonder whether any of these places have street lighting, and if they do, how it is provided.
@BigDave
60/70s onwards mostly everything was burried – the phone lines were installed at the same time as power, water etc. Troble is, not normally in trenches or trunking.
Round here most (except Virgin) are poles. Some postwar streets have power from poles too.
@RSF I look forward to seeing your patent for underground street lighting.
I think the point was they’re happy with high lampposts. Let them go without if they don’t want poles or pay the costs for ducts.
I’ve taken the commercial decision that providing lighting in underground ducts is just going to cost too much, so instead I’m using permitted development rights to erect poles instead, and since I’m considerate I’m going to let the telecom networks have access to them for their own services.
In doing so I will prove that underground lighting is in fact the solution to the world, the universe, and everything, not 42.
@Random Precision, bingo.
If we were rebuilding the entire from scratch, and had unlimited funds to do so, then naturally everyone would support not needing poles.
In reality we’re not doing that and the funds are certainly not unlimited. Consequently, choices have to be made, and if the locals aren’t prepared to pay for the more expensive option (either by direct contribution to the build costs, or by increased prices paid for the services themselves), then they can go without.
I do wonder how well a local politician would do in any election if their manifesto stated that they’d ensure that all new networks were built underground, but the cost of doing so would be +15% to their council tax bill for the duration of their term in office.
I bet there isn’t one with enough balls to even suggest it.
There are not so many Urban Street lights that use multiple Power cables between them.
I can imagine a great multitude of reasons why it likely wouldn’t be practical, but I’m guessing the notion of utilising street lighting columns for FTTP installation must have been considered? (Speaking generally, rather than specifically about this case.)
It’s not all that common, but the reverse situation does exist – i.e. streetlighting sometimes being fitted to telecoms or electricity poles.
The electricity pole outside my house has lighting attached to it as well as telecoms equipment.
Since there’s no active equipment as far as the fibre network is concerned, there’s zero reason to believe that telecoms equipment can’t be retrofitted to purpose built lighting poles.
Structurally, lighting columns are not designed to support lateral loads. Openreach used a steel hollow pole previously that was fundamentally the same as a lighting columns and these are now all condemned as they were very prone to sheering at the point where it narrows.
There’s a lot of rules and calculations surrounding telegraph pole loading to ensure that there’s not a risk of them collapsing due to the number of attached cables.
Boomers strike again, they complain when they don’t have super fast broadband to stream BBC boomer player or use Faceboomer, yet when superfast broadband comes to their area they complain about poles, I have a friend who lives in this area and it’s a nice part of the world so I can see why they don’t want it spoilt but why the sudden “anti-pole” sentiment, telephone poles have been around for years (as someone has already mentioned street lighting)
I don’t see why they are bothered. I have FTTP with Lightspeed and the nearest pole is streets away they just used the existing phone sockets as most houses can have 2 lines as standard. I guess TOOB have not considered that.
Do you have evidence that it’s “boomers” objecting or is that just knee jerk bigotry? Maybe it’s just residents of all ages with a pride in their area and wanting to keep it that way.
I love starlink
You premise is either ducted or connected to a enabled pole in order to get a lightspeed service
You one of the lucky ones mine is direct in ground si no chance for me currently
Poles can be good when done right.
Lazy planning and cost effective decision making has inflamed an issue though, not just Toob alone but many operators incl Openreach.
Standard Poles were designed for final drop. When used this way it does not stand out too much, they were always there. The difference now is that to save time/cost the use of the poles for Aerial distribution has been implemented. Here potentially it has been pushed a bit too far.
In the majority of cases there is likely a duct route UG to feed the pole. This is not always used though in favour of pole-2-pole stringing of cables because its easier and no risk of blockages.
Where Aerial feeders are used, rather than 1 cable per network which is quite feasible you can see 7 or more cables pole to pole to avoid the duct routes. Low fibre count cable feeding a single pole but hopping over a few.
(a 7mm cable could carry 8 or 768 customers, depends how it is used).
These multi-string poles are rapidly looking like a telco infrastructure from Asia. Where there are moves to transition to UG as the Aerial is costly to maintain and ugly.
https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20210202000709
It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
I don’t know about Toob, but Openreach seem to use the pole-to-pole method even where the ducts feeding copper to the poles are not blocked.
Some poles near me now have 6 separate fibre cables strung between them, all at slightly different heights, and that’s just for Openreach. No doubt it was quicker and cheaper than pulling 6 cables through a duct, or using one cable with a higher fibre count for that span, but it’s much more noticeable than before.
Exactly what we have here. Openreach went pole to pole and it wasn’t too bad. Now the altnets have arrived it’s starting to look like a rats nest.
I guess pole to pole wasn’t feasible with copper as the cables would have been too heavy and thick?
I’m a broadband field engineer at Openreach.
There are residential areas/streets (maybe hundreds houses) where existing copper based telephone and broadband(FTTC with good speeds)are provided exclusively underground.Also electricity is all underground.Installing poles by Openreach or others in these areas is just wrong,ugly and cheap exercise.
Aurelian, agreed. On the other hand where I live, electricity and FTTC are delivered by pole so the handful of extra poles installed by an altnet really makes no difference. If another altnet came along though and duplicated the poles I wouldn’t be happy, nor would I be thrilled with SE Asia levels of cabling strung across the road. It’s a pity residents aren’t offered the option of an underground connection at a price but rather just left out. It’s a pity too that some people have no pride in their home or their neighbourhood.
So who should pay? Or have you not considered that?
I.e. it’s expensive to install underground, should the homeowners pay a comprehensive installation charge to have the new fibre installed underground? Or should it be absorbed and subsidised by those customers who are currently served with overhead lines?
Do you see the problem here?
Don’t forget a lot of altnets building these networks are only looking to build them and then sell them on anyway. They don’t care about residents. They just want to build them as cheaply as possible with a view to selling them on.
One or two vocal, self appointed, self opinionated, objectors can sometimes produce a result that perhaps the majority don’t support.
However, Toob’s statement seems to suggest they talked to residents in the area. If so, and a majority don’t want the poles despite the benefits, then Toob are just being a good neighbour. Particularly as they could probably build anyway using PD rights if they wanted.
Not sure if there anything to see here…
Thing is if they were stuck on 1/2 meg ADSL then they would probably be more of a case for accepting the poles but as they have gigabit VMO2 already it’s a harder sell. I’m sure a lot of areas that have been designated open plan would be seriously impacted by poles.
Toob are being a good neighbour but what surprises me is that they did not even consider underground ducts as an option. It was just firbre on poles or no fibre at all. It’s all about business decisions and if one company was to go into these areas and build their fibre in ducts, they will then become a monopolist in the area and will be abpe to charge the residents for fibre broadband as they please, as there’ll be no competition
The cost of underground ducting is a minimum of around 1100 to 1500 or more per premise depending on the specific challenges of the premises in question
Personally I think having cars parked on streets is ugly, but people are allowed to do that for some reason.
The thing I don’t understand is. These people complaining about new poles being erected. Couldn’t they agree to do away with copper cables from the existing poles. The use those existing poles to get FTTP. This means you get FTTP and no new poles and the same amount of cabling. It is a better work around than nobody getting FTTP.
What we are talking about here is areas that have always been served by underground cabling and there haven’t previously been telegraph poles of any kind.
@Mark Why do you always say the poles are necessary to roll out the infrastructure. The majority of poles around are either in the countryside where is does actually makes sense or where they were added to built up arenas in the 1950s when BT was state owned and had no money so did it on the cheap.
We have had huge improvements in the equipment that installers can now use to cut through the pavement and back fill plus how is it that Virgin has managed to lay the cables underground and make it profitable when toob can’t
Jake, you’ve surely seen VM prices vs AltNet provisioned prices to knpw the answer to that question? You cannot compare a vertically integrated company to horizontal suppliers.
The AltNets will sell wholesale products to ISPs who want to be competitive. Pushing up your costs is not the way to do that. Plus, if we’re digging it would be nice to put some 3-phase cabling in for a “dig once” and properly future-proof with a distribution network which supports EV and heat-pump proliferation.
@Paul Rhodes, that would be nice.
Not sure what the proliferation of 3-phase power supply is across the country, but if we’re going down the heat pump and EV route without a plan to get 3-phase power into every home, then that’s the next disaster waiting to happen.
A few weeks ago my DNO “upgraded” the power cables by me, installing new ABC to replace what was there beforehand. Not checked closely enough to see if this is 3-phase ABC, but if it is then the roll-out is going to be slow and expensive; they must have had 10 vehicles and 20 people working on 5 poles, with power out 9-3.
RightSaidFred – Probably just a delooping by the DNO (a ‘costing saving’ measure to link to houses to the same supply via 1 fuse and cable – I’m currently having mine done). 3 phase is only needed for 22Kwh charging which is overkill for 99% of home users. Most homes just have 7Kwh which can be done on single phase.
Karens and Kevins out in force.
All it takes is one to spoil it.
Should just install them and ignore the serial complainers.
Toob are a peasant ISP. They use cgnat, gpon, they have no status page. I’ve looked up their ASN and they have just over 17000 ipv4 addresses. They are a cowboy company. Avoid at all costs.
Yeah but £25 a month for 900mb/s. I could live with CGNAT for that price happily.
XGS-PON, and whilst use CGNAT by default (as most new entrants need to do) will provide a public static IPv4 address for an additional monthly cost. Even including that it’s still a very reasonably priced service for a gig symmetric
It seems you’re unaware but most alt-nets use cgnat. £25/mo for 900/900 Internet cannot be beaten. They’re also running IPv6 so you’ll find the majority of traffic runs over that, mitigating any concerns of cgnat bottleneck.
Find me another altnet that has more than 17k IP addresses?
> XGS PON
> IPv6
> £25/mo 900/900
Sure buddy…
CGNAT is not an issue for most people.
@Chris W
It is if like me you have an IP camera system you wish to remotely access and these are becoming more & more common to the extant that they are now included in the basket of items that are used for calculating inflation.
I’m ex-Openreach, and reading this in the Cayman Islands, where it costs the equivalent of GBP£85 / month for 300/150 Mbps. People who block infrastructure deployment are Luddites who are making their neighbours’ children suffer. There’s no excuse for this petty parochialism in the UK: the country has enough challenges as it is.
“We are making some changes to our internet speeds; and we wanted you to hear it first.
We have some exciting news! As of February 2024,
…you will be upgraded to 300Mbps of fibre internet!
That’s right…200Mbps of additional speed!
You will see a slight increase in your February 2024 bill, as your new package will be billed at the new price of $89/month.
We can’t wait for you to enjoy your new speed and thank you for being a loyal Logic customer.”
– message from https://logic.ky/ in December, forcibly ‘upgrading’ me to a more expensive package (they’ve scrapped their lowest tier).
Isn’t the Cayman Islands a tax haven for international tax dodgers, so everythings going to be expensive,… “Othwerwise we tells the authorities back home, si, si” Of course its going to be expensive, the locals will cream you for keeping shtumm.
Tax avoidance, aka running away with your sweetie jar, is yet another childish way of not paying for infrastructure investment.
“Only fools and horses” fun fact… 67 million people can’t all fit on the Cayman Islands as permanent residents, despite the sun, sea, sand, coconuts and suncream.
That notion is about as childish in its unfettered rose-tinted optimism as the one the Germans had in WW2 that no-one would respond to their aerial bombing.
Harrow Telecable (Later Telewest, then Virgin) installed underground ducted co-ax round here in 1990, despite the pre-existing BT poles.
Costs of installation are probably lower in real terms now than in 1990.
The problem is every under-capitalised son-of-a-signal-amplifier-and-his-dog has been allowed to play in the FTTP game and get a licence. So we now the UK end-ups with a patch-work quilt of FTTP as moreinstallers continue to cherry-pick and refuse to install on any terms other than their own . . that will be good for uniform economic development of the country.
All this new technology is sold to the public on the basis that its primarily for their benefit . . . well apparently not.
Bids for Regional/large district installation contracts would have ensured that the game participants came to the table with sufficient capital and a reasonable contract enforced profit expectation instead of this pirate stuff.
What are HMG and OFCOM doing, sitting on there hands and whistling Dixie.
What a split-arse, stupid country this is. Run by morons.
Spot on.
Virgin media is still servicing the accumulated debt from that era 30 years ago!
Err… Name of the game sonny.. You may recall that the nineteenth century railway companies had to fund some projects by issuing one hundred year bonds…. Unfortunately, enduring infrastructure does not come out of the pay out slot of a one-armed bandit fruit machine…
With an average 2% growth rate in the UK since 1990, the sheer mathematics means that the UK economy has doubled in sze, in real terms, over that period, yet apparently we are being told that we can’t afford to make the same level of investment we did then. Bullshine.
Under investment, the same disease that stuffed the post WW2 UK economy and caused the UK to become the “Sick man of Europe” in the 1970… allowing the MHT spiel in 1978 to sound if it was positive.. Welcome to the new old game show for all tbe nation.. “You’ve Been conned, serially”
Under investment is the killer… even the ex-Greek finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis (Markist) says so and, according to him, the problems Europe wide
@Niick Roberts
You’re conflating a lot of different things there.
Firstly, the Railways you refer to ended up going bust just a few decades later and needed to be nationalised.
So much for your 100 year bonds.
We live in an age where we need to attract investment in infrastructure. It’s all about ROI. If the ROI is good in fibre broadband, they will invest, if it isn’t then they wont. It really is that simple.
Cable companies went bust and were consolidated precisely because they spent eye watering sums installing new subterranean infrastructure. The debt from this is still being serviced today.
The idea that you are stating this is the way it is or that it should be is wrong.
If you look at the places around the globe which deployed fibre broadband before anyone else, Japan, South Korea, places like San Francisco, they all not only have overhead lines, but the ugliest mess of overhead line imaginable.
These are not some sort of backwaters these amongst the most advanced economies in the world.
If you people feel so strongly that telecommunication infrastructure should be buried in the ground right up to their front door, then they need to be prepared to pay for it. But the issue is that people cant afford it and neither can the nation.
There are plenty of pockets of streets which dont have virgin cable even though the surrounding areas do. The reason is that 30 years ago when the infrastructure was being laid in the ground, nimbiasm took hold in those streets and so the operators skipped them, just like in this article. The current occupiers of those streets today wonder why they were left behind.
If streets are left behind because of such nymbiasm, no other operator is going to run cabling to them afterwards as its not commercially viable. And overbuilding has all but stopped now due to the changing economic situation and the realisation that ROI and uptake of these services is no where near what everyone forecast them to be.
Didn’t you prevent the cable company from digging near your house because you thought their 300 mm deep excavation would destabilise your house, Nick?
And prevent Openreach installing a pole on private property to reach a part of that private property?
And yet fibre over-building can be afforded. Shows you how distorted the economic and social models are.
In 1990 Harrow Telecable simply ran the cable down the public footpath leaving miniature-manhole tap-points outside every house. It was then the householder who decided whether THEY wanted to connect to the service and pay the cost of the extra cable installation, street-to-house.
Things seem to have changed, I wonder why?
I wonder how its done in Singapore (They knock the UK bandy, economically)
It’s done like this in Singapore: https://www.netlinktrust.com/images/2022/04/InstallationGuide170819_new_logo.pdf
https://www.netlinktrust.com/
Cost £600 million to get fibre to within installable reach of every property in Singapore. Of course Singapore is just slightly different from the UK or any of our cities in that it has a higher population density than any of them with tons living in apartments.
Interesting comments on here. Living on one of the roads mentioned, the statement from Toob is a lie. If they did do their consultation with residents, it’s interesting how the neighbour opposite missed their consultation that a pole was being put at the end of the drive. There’s a lamppost they could have put a note on, or leaflets. Very 20th century I know.
Their permitted development notification went up just before christmas and was closed on boxing day, so the time to comment on applications was limited. Toob knew what they were doing, simple as that.
Having lived previously where Zzoomm rolled out FTTP, they dropped leaflets through and did this magic thing called digging up the pavement.
The complaining and objecting by residents was because Toob thought they could get away with it. Written by a 1990s kid,
Good to hear from someone affected by this.
Given the very short timescale to comment, what changed Toob’s mind ?
What was the crux of the opposition ? Were people happy enough with existing provision and couldn’t see the need for poles ? Or was it the poles themselves that were the issue ? Or something else ?
Virgin has the monopoly here, openreach speeds are pitiful, so if they’d managed it properly take up could have been huge. Combination of the actual poles, and the underhand way they went about it. From the responses they’ve sent the MP and councillor, it sounds like because there is no ducting, and poles weren’t an option, they couldn’t be bothered with the extra hassle.
This one takes the biscuit:-
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/man-stunned-find-30ft-broadband-32201325
What the image doesn’t seem to show is the ground where that pole is situated. He says that it is within his boundary but it’s quite possible that it is in the street; you can see the edge of the footpath in the image.
@RightSaidFred
Go further down the page and there’s 2 photos showing the pole is clearly planted in the grass. There is no pathway and it looks highly likely that the grass is the owners property.
The pole is clearly in the grass and therefore on his property.
A relative lives in an old cottage and owns the access road across the front of the property to the main road.
He allows vehicle access to newer properties built on a strip of land opposite that had no official accessway due to the original plan to use adjacent land being rejected.
He’s had recent dealings with Broadband cowboys who thought they could install poles for FTTP broadband wherever they liked on his road until he informed them of it’s status.
He wouldn’t have been so annoyed and allowed some installations if the broadband company had checked the land registry first to determine ownership and contacted him about it instead of assuming they could do want they wanted.
As a pole dissenter may I point out I worked damned hard with my husband to afford a home on an estate with underground infrastructure, I welcome competition but underground please, my home now has to look at a 10 metre pole from my window after 25 years of an unobstructed view. Don’t abuse my right to object to poles, it’s not about broadband provision but the objection to unscrupulous providers of infrastructure who ride roughshod over communities when discussion and opportunities to compromise would be preferable and in the long term, more sustainable and profitable for providers of broadband service providers.
Karen by name and by nature.
“Resting compoface” – Come off it. If someone stuck a wooden pole or other construction in front of your home with minimal/zero notice that might effect it’s value and said “tough” you’d be whining.
The main difference is some have the nads to post under their real name.
are you really called Karen?
Karen and David are those customers who complain when they can’t get fast broadband, start a campaign to get it, then the contractors turn up to put the poles in, then start another campaign to block them, claiming they don’t need fast broadband.
And posters should be welcome to post under whatever names, they choose, if you take what’s written, so personally that says more about you than the other poster.
Where I live in a rural location there is no street lighting and a mixture of poles and ducts. Truespeed were in 1st and used existing poles and ducts – not sure if any new poles were installed but I don’t think so. Some residents still kicked up a fuss. As it turned out, the whole experience was painless. OR have now come to town as well and again, painless. I think it was a small minority who probably don’t use the internet at all – their main concern was disruption. All worked out in the end though.
However, Bristol Water have closed a road into the village for 6 months.
Could be like my road – Nexfibre and now giganet have dug up the pavements twice. They’ve done a reasonable job but still plenty of moaning (mostly over Nexfibres cabinets everywhere and giganets slow to build underground cabinets). Can’t wait for Openreach to come along in a few years time and either dig the pavements up yet again to access the 50 year old ducts or just shove up poles!