Oh dear Gawd here we go again, and from someone we actually have respect for. Yet here is Councillor Robert Pritchard sadly jumping on the telegraph pole bandwagon.
Lightspeed Networks must be getting somewhat miffed that they are copping out for all of this attention from our local Councillors, considering Openreach are responsible for putting up many poles in Tamworth at the same time. Pritchard is also evidently not an avid reader of Councillor Richard Kingstones’ page where he’s already called for a meeting with residents (groan). Interestingly, he’s decided to utilise his place of work, Rawlett school for this, which we think is rather dodgy to be quite frank. To be honest though Lightspeed, you may as well just pull out of some areas of Tamworth now if people are going to give you this much hassle.
What we will give Pritchard is the less jingoistic let’s wind up the residents for popularity points approach that Kingstone has inevitably taken, just for once though we’d love a politician to tell the moaning minority to shut the heck up and find more important things to do. You’d think a company was going around painting people’s houses a fetching neon green without permission the aggravation this is causing. Fact is, Kingstone might well believe he has championed people power by getting residents to physically intimidate telecoms workers into leaving their street prior to erection. Unfortunately what he appears to not comprehend is that one company may well have agreed to bury cables in one area, others may just not bother at all now. If they did want to provide services, they would also have to dig up the street for their cable, as Lightspeed are very unlikely to share their ducts with a competitor. Openreach are also very unlikely to dig up the road to put in their own cable and give residents access to the plethora of suppliers that use their infrastructure. Essentially, Kingstone has likely helped create a monopoly where your choice for high speed actual fibre optic broadband, is, drumroll… Lightspeed. Or you could carry on being a broadband peasant enjoying your decaying copper of course (yes that includes Virgin Media who have tried desperately to pretend they are one of the cool glass kids too).
So it remains to be seen how this all pans out. Kingstone himself has admitted he personally has no problem with poles, Pritchard has not said whether he is keen on them. Both however are happy to perpetuate the idea that anyone should be really that bothered. Although at Debunking, we do agree that we’d be pretty pissed off if someone placed their huge pole right in front of our window, but that’s the limit. As for Pritchard’s call for them to publish a map showing where they plan to put their phallus temples to faster Internet, you can usually see where planned telecoms work is going to be by visiting One Network.
Here at Debunking Towers, our broadband is a pigeon carrying a USB stick, with a short hop involving the Email Urchin carrying it in. We’d welcome the glory of fibre optics to enhance the consumption of smut and debauchery in multiple 8k virtual reality streams. Strangely enough, our coverage of all of this has not really set the Mailbag on fire and didn’t get many voted on the pole poll we ran, (the ‘is Brina a cockwomble’ poll did very well however) are we right that most people really couldn’t give a toss? Let us know.
