[TelstraClear] How did telstra lay cable?

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#390755 12-Oct-2010 08:59

one other little piece of history. Saturn bought decoders and remote controls that had been bought by Telecom for First Media. You could see where the "first media" logo had been removed on the remote and they still had a "first" button.

geekiegeek

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#390760 12-Oct-2010 09:19

At the time of the rollout I worked as a telco contractor.

I installed the cabling and krone blocks in multiple roadside cabinets and also all of the krone blocks in the seaview exchange. I also spent many hours up pole's installing the pole terminals. In my spare time I did faults for Telecom. It was a busy time to work in the telco infrastructure area.

It was a really fast rollout in Wellington, they would have multiple crews working street by street from early morning to late at night.

I also remember the First Media rollout in Karori using underground boring machines that kept hitting water mains and other services due to the bad mapping of where the services were in the ground.

zaptor

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Ultimate Geek

#390906 12-Oct-2010 12:59

Linuxluver:

The reason was simple enough: Telecom had been sold far too cheaply, gaining a (est. if you had to build it today) US$50B national network to almost every home and business for US$4.8B. No one else could get a national network at an effective 90% discount....and the NZ taxpayer was royally ripped off by the entire transaction.....

Yep, national telcos are huge cash cows.

Any wonder the richest man in the world effectively own his country's telco (plus a few other initially undervalued entities). As an example of a "state supported" monopoly Telecom is nowhere near in the same league as Telmex (and it's subsidiaries).

sbiddle

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#391066 12-Oct-2010 19:25

graemeh: I always laugh at the hairy hippies complaining about overhead cable in Wellington and then in the next breath they are promoting trolley buses - guess what, they use overhead cable and it's far more obtrusive than more cables on a power pole.

Not to mention the people who were anti overhead cables and wanted everything underground, who also objected to green boxes everywhere if the cable was run underground.

I just think the whole irony of UFB is that organisations and councils in Auckland who stopped TCL's HFC rollout in it's tracks due to their objections to the overhead cabling are now pro UFB and eager to have the fibre run overhead. Go figure..

ockel

2031 posts

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#391155 13-Oct-2010 06:31

sbiddle:
graemeh: I always laugh at the hairy hippies complaining about overhead cable in Wellington and then in the next breath they are promoting trolley buses - guess what, they use overhead cable and it's far more obtrusive than more cables on a power pole.

Not to mention the people who were anti overhead cables and wanted everything underground, who also objected to green boxes everywhere if the cable was run underground.

I just think the whole irony of UFB is that organisations and councils in Auckland who stopped TCL's HFC rollout in it's tracks due to their objections to the overhead cabling are now pro UFB and eager to have the fibre run overhead. Go figure..

Very very ironic. Thats 10 years of lost investment and the prospect that the incumbent would have considered FTTN or FTTH earlier due to platform based competition.

What a wasted opportunity.

Sixth Labour Government - "Vision without Execution is just Hallucination"

graemeh

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#391230 13-Oct-2010 10:32

sbiddle: I just think the whole irony of UFB is that organisations and councils in Auckland who stopped TCL's HFC rollout in it's tracks due to their objections to the overhead cabling are now pro UFB and eager to have the fibre run overhead. Go figure.

Really? That's too funny.

I quite like the idea of using a pit instead of the green boxes every few houses. Costs a bit more but you can't knock it over with a car!

Of course you know that even if the connection box is put in the ground you will get someone complaining about the colour of the lid :)

stuzzo

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#391270 13-Oct-2010 11:39

I wonder about the supply security aspect of overhead fibre. It would need a fair price advantage to my thinking.

The elements esp. wind, vandalism, vehicles taking out poles and fibre obviously takes a lot of work to resplice.

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cyril7

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#391277 13-Oct-2010 11:47

Citylink fibre is largely overhead in Wellington using the trolley bus poles, I rarely hear of pole fade on their network.

Cyril

ockel

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#391279 13-Oct-2010 11:48

stuzzo: I wonder about the supply security aspect of overhead fibre. It would need a fair price advantage to my thinking.

The elements esp. wind, vandalism, vehicles taking out poles and fibre obviously takes a lot of work to resplice.

There has been plenty submitted and discussed on the difference in costing for overhead vs underground. It is a significant price advantage. Of course that has to be weighed with the useful life of ~10 years (taking into account the issues you've described) for a pole vs 40 years for underground......

Sixth Labour Government - "Vision without Execution is just Hallucination"

D1023319

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#391297 13-Oct-2010 12:26

I live in Hataitai where trolley bus lines are the biggest source of visual pollution outfront of my house. So I challenged the anti cable group CORA?? at the time about why they werent opposing trolley bus lines as well. Their response was Trolley bus lines are good but teleco are bad so go figure!

Personally I like the visual Telstra/Saturn lines as they represent $$$ in my back pocket by being competition to Telecom ( apart from better service).

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that a big reason Telstra stopped its rollout to other urban areas was that Telecom dropped their prices where Telstra was while keeping their prices up elsewhere. And this practice was endorsed by the monopolies commision.

ockel

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#391302 13-Oct-2010 12:34

You're correct in some regards. Pocket pricing stopped the rollout in Christchurch. Hard to stay whether it stopped it in Auckland - the economics of undergrounding were the death knell but the prospect of Telecom pocket pricing in Auckland would have been a contributing factor.
Those in the know would have had to get their abacuses out to determine whether the profitability using lower-cost rollout overhead was going to be enough to offset the lower prices driven by Telecom.
But as a consumer you were denied this opportunity by the farsighted city councils.

Sixth Labour Government - "Vision without Execution is just Hallucination"

quickymart

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#391596 13-Oct-2010 23:23

An interesting read, this thread, brings back the memories. I worked there when Saturn were getting into the gist of rolling their cable around Wellington, Chch followed and Auckland would have been next, had residents groups not said, "we don't want to see cables...they block our views...of other cables..."

Yet in America I've seen THREE different cable networks with their infrastructures all one below the other, about 25cms apart, on the same pole, and no one seems to care. Crazy.

Cable is good, if you can get it. Auckland missed out by not letting it happen, I reckon.

The Chch rollout was "paused" in 2001 while the company went through restructuring. It's been "paused" ever since, as far as I know.

stuzzo

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Ultimate Geek

#391621 14-Oct-2010 04:56

Of course, there's been a quantum leap in the appreciation of the internet since those days and most people couldn't conceive a world without it now.

Back then (2000) a lot of people didn't have an internet connection and ADSL was just in it's infancy.

tombrownzz

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#391866 14-Oct-2010 16:40

Tatou: Badly if our street is any example.

If I recall I responded to door knocking or a flyer in the mailbox and signed up for Chello and Saturn TV but left my phone with Telecom.

In my professional capacity I had to deal with the cowboy contractors (not all were cowboys) and poor planning by Saturn when they were laying the network- what a nightmare.

However not withstanding that I have been a satisfied customer over the years for the internet services. Saturn TV has morphed to Sky without the dish and the Sky business model- I watch very little TV

Luckily I have only rung the call center about three times in all those years- once to get digital upgrade.

How much did you have to pay to get the cable inserted into the ground from the street to your house? Because Sky uhf was available since 1997 and Saturn TV was only available since 1999 so why would you pay probably $1000 to get your land dug up when you could just get sky uhf?

Tatou

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#391910 14-Oct-2010 18:26

A good question but not related to my posting :-)

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