The humble telegraph pole, first introduced in the 1850s as a means of introducing the telephone to many as wide and as quickly as possible. It has found a new life recently with fibre broadband companies using them to quickly distribute their fibre optic networks around the country. All of a sudden Tamworth has found itself included in a veritable forest of new poles being erected all over. Naturally, some people aren’t happy with this, which makes them at odds with the good people at the Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society if nothing else.
It seems Councillor Richard Kingstone is busy sticking his oar in and taken umbrage against the wooden poles, which already graced a large number of streets before any of us were even born. Not content with new poles going up, he has tried to insist to new telecoms providers that they bury the cables instead, and moaning about them on social media when they haven’t done what he told them to do. This has now got to the point where he’s instructed his sheeple following to go and abuse one particular company Lightspeed networks on their social media pages. Not to mention riling up said sheeple so that they physically went outside mob handed to drive those unwelcome erections away from their streets.
So why are these companies using poles and not just burying the cables? Well simply cost and speed. The country has been crying out for actual optical fibre broadband which is faster and generally a lot more reliable. It opens up a whole lot more competition to residents which will give them a larger choice of providers than those we’ve been stuck with for decades. New housing estates have had the benefit of being able to have their cables buried whilst the estate was being built. Everyone else either needs to have the poles to get fibre optic broadband or wait until eventually someone decides to dig up the road to every house which would cost them a fortune and cause a huge amount of disruption.
Who dear reader do we think will be first to complain when multiple service providers come along to dig up the street at varying times to install their cables? Yes we might have an easy guess too. Fact is, it is extremely unlikely any service provider who has put ducts in a street is going to let anyone else use theirs, for fear of their tampering damaging the cables and cutting off service for their customers. Virgin Media have ducts all over Tamworth but won’t share for this reason, and the fact that much cash was spent getting that cable in the ground in the first place, why should they give competition a leg up. Using poles means that several utilities can and have to share that pole which means less digging up the road.
So what is going to happen now that Richard and his mob have driven away those nasty purveyors of poles? Well quite simply it is highly likely that no fibre provider is going to invest in the area or lay cables. They want to get the job done and move on, they don’t want to spend months digging up roads when they could have strung a cable up across poles quickly and easily. It is very possible that places these poles have been turned down for will never get fibre optic broadband ever, or at least for a few years and be stuck with whatever Virgin Media or Openreach based providers offer. So good luck with that.
We aren’t quite sure how telegraph poles are so jarring for people that they go out of their way to let themselves get so upset over them. Surely there’s more important things in life? We’ve got residents in this town that go berserk when a mobile phone mast is proposed because of that nasty 5g letting Bill Gates track you with the vaccine chip and spreading Covid. Now they’re getting worked up over wooden poles, which granted aren’t exactly the most attractive thing in the world, the streets of Tamworth are hardly naturally beautiful though, and their visual appeal will most definitely not be impacted by them. Some however are apparently so offended by the idea of what would eventually just become unnoticed street furniture going up that they will physically go out and intimidate people just doing their job.
Ironically, we’ve noticed on Richards Council expenditure, that he feels the need to report on every month, that his broadband and phone service seems to cost him a fortune at £68 a month, half of which he reckons is used up by council work (is it heck). He probably could have done with his broadband bill being knocked down a bit, but with his current attitude he could well be waiting a while. So whilst Richard thinks it’s brilliant that people power has won the day, it’s quite possibly going to hit his residents right where they don’t need it, in their pockets, and keep them in the broadband dark ages, they certainly won’t be in pole position when it comes to great deals the rest of us are getting. Feel free to thank him later on his social media page.
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