The Height of the Storm Reviews the Telegraph

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

The single worst storm out of the iii turned out to exist Storm Eunice, which generated 2 rare red warnings for wind – with some gusts reaching up to 122mph – and has been named by the Met Office as the "well-nigh severe and damaging tempest" to touch on England and Wales since February 2014. Admittedly, the affect of such events does depend somewhat upon where you alive.

Annotation: For several days after Tempest Eunice, Openreach's engineers reported and received ten times more damage incidents than usual. At one point, they recorded vii,000 harm reports in just 24 hours.

Openreach, similar many other broadband and telecommunications firms, suffered a fair chip of damage and disruption to some parts of their network – due to the affect of flooding, snow, major power cuts and loftier 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 stance (examples here, here, here and here).

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

Sadly, getting whatever solid data on this is hard (e.g. long-term costs – inc. repairs – of overhead vs hugger-mugger 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, equally it needs specialist equipment to elevator and identify the pole, and oft we need to gain permission to use rubber measures like road closures or temporary traffic lights – which are vital. In some places we've had to replace as many equally five poles in a row, so it can exist very time consuming."

However, it'south of import to put this into some perspective, since Openreach has more than 4 million poles across the United Kingdom, some of which are equally much as 15 metres loftier (eight-9m is more mutual). Put some other way, the storms damaged simply 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 practise succumb to high winds and falling trees.

The price to replace a damaged pole is a difficult thing to pin down, due in part to the issues mentioned past Openreach higher up and the complexity of the damage itself (eastward.1000. did the pole just break or has the foundation been destroyed too). Non to mention that at that place may be a cost to replace whatever kit at the acme of the pole, if it was damaged.

The poles themselves aren't very expensive to purchase, relatively speaking, merely costs do add up once y'all consider all the labour, admin and permissions needed for installation. Culling network providers tell us that the price of just installing a new (non damaged) pole can range from around £550 to over £i,000, which makes them quite cost-effective and not a item concern for the bean counters.

The other result is of how long information technology actually takes to replace a pole, which of course depends more than upon the wider bug of road permits/permissions, availability of applied science resource 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 farthermost damage (rare), but in urban areas a downed pole may be a matter of hours or only 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 affect from the recent storms seems unlikely to change that. Lest we forget that poles continue to exist mutual in some countries where typhoons and hurricanes are a regular occurrence, thus weather alone is not enough to change the statement.

Annotation: The CEO of Liberty Fibre recently did a useful video to present the ISP-side'south perspective on poles (here).

Poles remain a common sight across much of the UK, and you tin find plenty of people who would be more than than happy to accept their deployment if it meant gaining access to a full fibre network. Likewise, in that location seems to exist no shortage of studies claiming to show how the provision of faster broadband networks – via either pole or secret cables – tends to effect in house values going up, rather than downwards.

Naturally, we'd all adopt it if broadband and mobile infrastructure was totally invisible, just that's not ever economically feasible because underground deployments tend to be significantly more than expensive. In some areas the pick is thus between either having poles or no fibre at all.

UPDATE eighth March 2022

Openreach informs that, for storm related bug, information technology is currently taking around xx days to ready damaged poles. We too found some more than details virtually how Openreach test their poles (here).

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Source: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/03/recent-uk-storms-damaged-650-of-openreachs-telegraph-poles.html

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