Wealthy London NIMBYs grit teeth, welcome 'ugly' fibre cabinets BT has convinced residents of Kensington and Chelsea that they can live with "ugly" fibre optic cabling cabinets on their streets. The move comes after the Royal Borough rejected 96 of the installation proposals submitted by the national telco in May last year. Opposition to the cabinets has now collapsed, however, with the …
Now there will be big green thin steel sheet boxes just plonked wherever. The cheap paint will be easily scratched and they'll be full of dents.
So was there any attempt to make them more in keeping with surroundings? Maybe give them a thick coat of red paint and a little crown logo? Maybe even a curved top (not only aesthetically pleasing but will stop the oiks from sitting on it)
Actually, the BT ones are very sturdy. They seem to have servers or some form of electric machine inside them as they require 230V and have a fan whirring away inside.
But it's not so much the appearance I object to but the fact that they are installed on the pavement reducing the width of the path. Which is a real problem if some pillock has parked their car on the kerb as well.
Actually, the BT ones are very sturdy. They seem to have servers or some form of electric machine inside them as they require 230V and have a fan whirring away inside.
Um - that would be the whole point of the article. It's because the equipment is needed at street level that BT are having to install new cabinets.
Rule 244 actually states this:
You MUST NOT park partially or wholly on the pavement in London, and should not do so elsewhere unless signs permit it.
Now taking the whole sentence into context. Should not means in addition to the original must not. The critical point being the UNLESS clause. It has to be marked that you can park on the pavement for it to be legal.
"They seem to have servers or some form of electric machine inside them as they require 230V and have a fan whirring away inside." Thats the nature of the FTTC service, copper connections backhaul'd via a fibre connection to the POP.
"But it's not so much the appearance I object to but the fact that they are installed on the pavement reducing the width of the path. Which is a real problem if some pillock has parked their car on the kerb as well."
Give it 5 years when fibre connections are as pervasive as copper and the residents would be complaining that they don't have access to such speeds!
The great unwashed! The great bloody retarded more like.
"Councillor Tim Ahern claimed that the tech would be deployed "whilst safeguarding the historic integrity of the borough." He added that BT would work with the borough "in a spirit of cooperation".
Interestingly, the council had this to say in May 2012:
BT has not worked in a spirit of cooperation and needs to consider our historic streetscape. Perhaps one of its competitors will step into the role."
Europeans do modernisation, investment and progress far far better than the UK.
One think I dread when returning home, is the ugliness, tackiness, shoddy workmanship, mishmash of old and new and the general culture against change leaving cheap compromises.
The BT FTTC boxes look quite good to me, and provided that they are properly maintained the should continue to do so as they seem to be made of better materials than the standard green cabinets - possibly because they need to be as they will be stuffed full of active electronics powered off the mains. One of these has just been installed at the bottom of my road and, within a few days some oik sprayed some graffitti on it in silver paint. A few days later it had been cleaned off. Let's hope that they are kept maintained. Given what's in them, it will be in the company's interests to do so.
I've also not see any that are 6 foot tall - more like shoulder height to an average person. The FTTC cabinets in the adjacent borough of Hammersmith & Fulham look OK to me.
The last I heard are here there were plans to colour (paint) them more appropriately so they don't stick out like ugly sore thumbs. I believe that alternative shapes and designs were considered as well, as this is just a cover really as the interior will largely be the same.
But then telephone boxes are big red, largely useless (now) boxes, often scratched and damaged but they're a part of the sights of Britain now and quite a few are "protected" structures.
Doubtful they will go away. When you've got a home in a historic or heritage area you don't want to see it all bunked up by horridly designed infrastructure. That's why where I live they put it all underground or out of town near the water pumps and electric substations.
But I wonder how many of the people wingeing about "ugly" BT boxes actually also whine about how poor their broadband is?
I do agree, though, that BT could paint them in a selection of colours to make them stand out less. Stone grey for a street corner. Green for a park - that kind of thing. How hard could it be?
Putting them on the already overcrowded pavement is a mistake.
Instead, why not treat them as if they were a permanently parked motorcycle? Put them just roadside of the kerb and paint a yellow line around them.
Far less obstructive than a single parked car or a gentrificator's skip.
This is RBK&C - they're still reeling from the decision to go decimal
And they've never quite recovered from the revelation that one of their former MP's openly admitted to a gay encounter in his formative years. A certain Major Buff-Tweedy even had a coronary on hearing the news, because as all public school boys know, what happens in the Prefects room stays in the Prefects room.
Wouldn't overheating be an issue even for the above ground boxes? Yes, they would have a little better dissipation, due to the surface expose to air. But they would also get warmer, due to surface exposed to the sun.
Just use forced circulation - it is the same problem with the electrical grid.
Yes, flooding would be a problem. I am not sure what would be the best way to seal the cables entrances.
I did no think about a box this big. Maybe I misunderstood the size of the thing, but I thought it would be possible to just open the top, and work from the street level. Certainly i was not thinking about a subterranean box 2 meters high.
Yes, it could be done, but it would be a great deal more expensive as any underground chamber would have to be completely waterproof, require active cooling and good access for engineers. You might also expect It would be more like a small basement. It would also take a great deal longer to install.
The reason that cost matters is that adding perhaps £100-200K per box (given the cost of underground construction in London - where the pavements and roads are full of services) would make the roll-out financially non-viable unless a very considerable premium could be charged in the borough. As FTTC/FTTP is in competition with cable & exchange-based ADSL services, take-up is likely to be much lower, which would increase that premium much more.
No, no. I didn't think about something this big. I may have underestimated the dimensions My idea was a subterranean box, yes. But it would be a little more than a box on the pavement, and you would open the top and work from the street level.
I know the boxes are said to be 1,5 meters high. Here in Brazil we have some of them, to telephone/DSL. The size is about 1,5 meter high, 80 - 100 centimeters from side to side and a depth of about... 50 centimeters.
Put it on its side, and we are talking about a mere digging of just 60 cm of depth.
More expensive than a simple box, but surely much cheaper than a mini-basement. :D
Isn't London riddled with underground sewers and access tunnels anyway (after all, you don't want common people cluttering up the streets) ... surely a bit of planning (okay, a lot of planning) would let a lot of this stuff move underground.
Where I am in the US at the moment they moved all the cables (power and telecoms) underground thanks to weather related outages (and luckily it coincided with some much needed roadworks), and in some cases even the (admittedly smaller) junction boxes ended up flush with street level but when they need to work on them the guts get raised up to street level
In that part of London all the services are already underground. That makes the problem of finding underground space below the pavement in narrow London with sufficient access for an engineer and the relevant VDSL DSLAMs and power supplies even more difficult. (In principle, if PON was used, now power supply would be required, although that would require running optical fibre to each property requiring the new service.
nb. last time I looked, overhead supply of power in the US was far more common than in the UK. Indeed much of the skyline seems to be festooned with cables.
According to Maria Miller and the previous Reg article, "We are putting in the essential infrastructure that will make UK businesses competitive". That's fine, but BT/OpenReach appear to have a different agenda and are conveniently using this government initiative to roll out the big green boxes to the places they make the most money, which is not "UK businesses". I have a business right in the town centre, about 500m from the exchange. FTTC will not be available for another year. I live about 1Km down the same road in a completely residential part of the town and guess what - I could get FTTC 6 months ago!. BT want this in people houses because it makes their stats look better and they make more wonga, not that I'm complaining - I get 70MB/sec download at home ;-)
"We are putting in the essential infrastructure that will make UK businesses competitive".
The same line was used to justify the National Broadband Network in AUS.
And to justify TV, radio, and talking pictures.
And it's not like it should have been a total surprise: back in the 90's, when the internet was becoming popular, there was a widespread expectation that the primary use would be for entertainment, as for all previous technologies (including the telephone, prior to the introduction of radio). But we've just gone through a period where rightous indignation, and censorship, greated any attempt to say that high-speed-broadband is a replacement for broadcast televison.
But who cares now? .
The capital funding arrangements are in place. It's a big new TV system, and the proles are happy.
"BT has convinced residents of Kensington and Chelsea that they can live with "ugly" fibre optic cabling cabinets on their streets. The move comes after the Royal Borough rejected 96 of the installation proposals submitted by the national telco in May last year.
Opposition to the cabinets has now collapsed"
Bit of a no-brainer, for those not living the in the posh London suburb. Hum, Ugly box in street or copper ADSL, let’s see, let me think. (Speak volumes!)
This has as much to do with councillers that blocking the boxes could result in losing their seats as it does with anything else (including the issue that planning committee members can be found personally responsible for legal costs associated with politically motivated planning decisions)
NIMBYs are a very small group in K&C, even if they're exceedingly vocal. They're even louder when they get overruled.
OK, the complaint is they take up too much room. So, rather than trying to make them smaller, make 'em bigger: Add a roof and some walls, a couple of vending machines, a bench or two, and call it a bus stop!
Or add a bathroom (which is also convenient for the service guy when he gets there).
You could even use the waste heat from the equipment to take the chill off.
Heck, go Texas-sized: make it straddle the walkway, with a passage through the middle for the pedestrians. Sell advertising - maybe put some LED screens behind Lexan (you have power, you have data....)
Isn't the FTTC boxes.
K&C NIMBYs have been on a jihad for years to keep "eeeevil" mobile phone masts from radiating their childrens' brains. Once objections to the poles (usually modfied lamposts for urban in-fill work) started being struck down they started objecting to the cabinets on visual grounds.
(Twits don't understand inverse square laws, or how having a nearby base station reduces the mobile's transmit power, so they'll happily let kids play with wifi kit or carry mobile phones)
If they started objecting to one type of cabinet and not another, all objections would collapse. Hopefully the idiocy is now over and the vast majority of K&C residents can get decent broadband AND mobile signals.
Seems like digging a hole in the sidewalk and putting them underneath with an access hatch above would be a decent way to fix this. Surely there can't be cost objections, not in such an upscale neighborhood. Spread out over the decade or two service life of the cabinet, the cost of putting them underground would probably only amount to a handful of pounds per year per house. Add to the bill for those getting fiber or have the council tack it onto everyone's property bill.
Please try reading the other comments before rushing to add your own brilliant ideas. Further up others have made the same suggestion, only for replies pointing out that the remaining services already underground would mean there just wouldn't be room for something this large that could also be accessed by engineers.
BT has always been big on engineering, or rather OVER engineering. there is nothing secret or mysterious in running cables, as there were in past times.
Ever seen them check out underground conduits by dragging a large diameter dowl through them? How can other companies, with more kilometres underground than BT, can plough their cable in? Too modern, I guess.
Street boxes, aka 'pedestals', come in all shapes and sizes. I hate seeing cables and in building my home and hotels I have spent big money hiding the utilities to maintain the appearance.
There is one pedestal design which is simply installed into a hole drilled, with a fence post drill, in to the dirt. A sleeve is fitted and filled out with concrete. The cables enter through the bottom of the sleeve and terminate on a sliding member. This has a keyed access that pushes in to the sleeve so it is flush with the sidewalk or grass verge as the case might be.
Canadian Telco's use air operated 'slugs' that force their way under lawns dragging a fibre optic cable with them so there is no damage to the lawns.
If BT had competition undoubtedly they would pay more attention to appearances. That's the problem with monopolies.
I think you misunderstand the issue. It's not about the cabling, it's about the big box full of electronic kit.
"Canadian Telco's use air operated 'slugs' that force their way under lawns dragging a fibre optic cable with them so there is no damage to the lawns."
How many lawns do you think there are in Central London? And can these slugs bury big boxes full of electronic kit under the lawn too?
I believe BT does have competition. How attractive, relatively, are Virgin's boxes and all the mobile phone towers? Maybe I'm unlucky but round here the Virgin ones look much the same, maybe a bit bigger, though the one that's had a tarpaulin over it for six months doesn't look too great. The electricity substation in a paddock thing doesn't look all that attractive either.
Over here in suburban New Jersey, US. Comm boxes are being covered in graphic (vinyl I am guessing, meh to stopping and walking up to one) landscape designs. Garden flowers for example. This is done in more uppity neighborhoods than the one I live in, hence why I am always driving by them. But space is not an issue as it would be in a denser urban setting.
"Comm boxes are being covered in graphic vinyl...."
The competition (Virgin media) did that recently, the problem being that they (illegally) put bright red adverts on their boxes, and these looked manky when people started ripping them off.
I wonder just how many 16' CCTV poles are in the borough, how many parking meters, bollards (to stop eejits parking on the pavements) lamp-posts (mostly emblazoned with a big blue ugly recycling schedule sign) and parking restriction signs the council has put on the middle of pavements?
Take a tour of the borough on Streetview and these are all easy to see, but telco cabinets I could only find 4 on around 2 miles of road, all green painted and pushed right back against brick walls and railings.
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