Could someone from Spectrum who deals with the HFC infrastructure in Southern California, specifically the legacy Time Warner Cable area, contact me off list ?
Apparently the local infrastructure crew thinks it’s OK to leave cable running between two cans in a residential neighborhood since at least July 2022. But it’s OK, because they’ve cautioned them off with orange cones, right ?
Multiple calls to regular customer service fall on deaf ears about a coax trunk cable run above ground on a street and sidewalk in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
Customer service says, “We don’t know what you’re talking about, we don’t have cables running on the street”. Can’t seem to get a hold of the right people to come out and get it buried and get rid of the eyesore and safety hazard …
I used to work with a guy who kept accidentally cutting a temporary cable from a pedestal in his yard running to his neighbor's house every couple of weeks for a year and a half. Both he and the neighbor were mad at the cable company and were trying to make the cable company fix things.
The cable company would come fix / re-run the supposedly temporary cable within 36 hours of it being cut.
This went on from late spring one year until mid summer the next year.
FINALLY the cable company came out and buried (yet another) new cable.
I think that it's really sad that it took that long for the cable company to do what they said they would do in less than two weeks from the original repair.
Access to the right-of-way in most areas is granted through a CATV Franchise agreement with your municipality. This agreement will include a contact for disputes. As another avenue, contact the local government and ask them to deal with the safety issue in the public right of way and let them escalate with their contacts.
All i can say is good luck. We see the ‘trash-bag mod’ on a lot of AT&T aerial boots and PEDs, as well as Charter/Spectrum/TWC gear. A lot of times, they don’t even get that. Unless you know how to get in contact with a local tech, they will most likely not respond until the customer complains about their service being out. In which case, the same tech that ran the ‘low-level’ drop between PEDs will likely come back and do it again.
I think that this really says more about the race to the bottom in last mile residential operations.
It seems inevitable that once a last mile residential broadband operator grows to a certain gargantuan size, the quality of the network suffers and nobody really cares to take ownership of specific local problems.
I’ve seen it many times looking at infrastructure of probably a dozen different last mile operators in many different states and provinces.
And do you know what’s commonly found in the same places as stuff like garbage bag wrapped pedestals and coax temp-run between cans for months or years at a time? Employees who feel pressured to do cheap/shoddy/fast work and move on to the next ticket. Or workers doing these tasks who aren’t employees at all but piece work 1099 workers under a subcontract or a subcontractor-of-a-contractor. It’s not a good situation for the rank and file workers either. Go find the worker who eventually fixes that temp-run coax job and see if he’s really happy with his job.
I wish that the people running the networks at residential last mile operators with many hundreds of thousands up to dozens of millions of CPEs would push back against efforts from executives/management to participate in this race to the bottom of cost and network quality. It’s too easy to hand wave away the problem and be like “oh, but the middle mile fiber aggregation router and core links in and out of this market look fine, that’s somebody else’s problem to deal with the field work…”.
I selfishly hope they don't because that's where independent
operators will succeed.
Because of natural regional monopoly at physical layer (cabling
cost for a certain region is same between competitors but their
revenues are proportional to their regional market shares), they
can't succeed unless the physical layer is regulated to be
unbundled, which is hard with PON.
But, in US where regional telephone network has been operated
by, unlike Europe/Japan, a private company enjoying natural
regional monopoly, economic situation today should be no worse
than that at that time.
The cost to build physical layer in much of the suburban and somewhat rural US is low enough anymore that lots of smaller, independent, ISPs are overbuilding the incumbent with fiber and taking a big chunk of their customer base because they are local and care. And making money while doing it.
It might look low cost until you look at a post-1980s suburb in the USA or Canada where 100% of the utilities are underground. There may be no fiber or duct routes. Just old coax used for DOCSIS3 owned/run by the local cable incumbent and copper POTS wiring belonging to the ILEC. The cost to retrofit such a neighborhood and reach every house with a fiber architecture can be quite high in construction and labor.
The cost is not low. Trust me on that. I’ve been involved in a pretty massive suburban fibre deployment for the past decade… I expect we’ll make money sometime in the 2030’s… in time for me to retire.
Did you leverage things like micro trenching for this project? I may be mislead, but I thought micro trenching these days has helped drive the cost of doing this down fairly significantly.
My neighborhood is currently serviced by coax only. A contractor for Frontier is
digging, as I write this, in front of my home. They use a large Vermeer drill to
pull a conduit underneath the sidewalks. We have existing conduits from the
street to the homes.
I talked to the foreman (who is the son of the owner), and he told me that they
get around $100 per foot. That's for the conduit only, not a single fiber pulled.
A city inspector comes every day to check up on their work.
There is “microtrenching” and then there is microtrenching. Very different things are sometimes described by the same name. Some of what Google tried to go was exceedingly shallow, like 4 inches down. Cheap microtrenching done too quick and too shallow has given the concept a bad name.
There is microtrenched fiber in Vancouver BC that is close to 20 years old now throughout the downtown core that is nearly problem-free. The difference is that it is 12+ inches down and was installed using large, noisy, water cooled diamond-grit concrete saws cutting deep slits into the joints between streets and curbs, or concrete curbs and sidewalks, duct inserted, then backfilled with grouting. It’s deep enough where it crosses roads that re-paving the road by first grinding off the top several inches of surface is extremely unlikely to disturb the duct.
There is “microtrenching” and then there is microtrenching. Very different things are sometimes described by the same name. Some of what Google tried to go was exceedingly shallow, like 4 inches down. Cheap microtrenching done too quick and too shallow has given the concept a bad name.
The local ILEC is doing that here - they use a spade to make a little slot in the customer’s lawn and shove the cable in. If they have to cross a driveway or sidewalk, they dig out the expansion joint, shove the cable in and dump some cold patch in the gap. If they have to run multiple cables, they use a concrete saw to make the gap a bit wider.
There is microtrenched fiber in Vancouver BC that is close to 20 years old now throughout the downtown core that is nearly problem-free. The difference is that it is 12+ inches down and was installed using large, noisy, water cooled diamond-grit concrete saws cutting deep slits into the joints between streets and curbs, or concrete curbs and sidewalks, duct inserted, then backfilled with grouting. It’s deep enough where it crosses roads that re-paving the road by first grinding off the top several inches of surface is extremely unlikely to disturb the duct.
I’m familiar with the slightly more robust technique deployed by companies like Teraspan. I’m sure it works much better in the milder climate in BC. There are microtrench/VIF networks in Toronto and Ottawa as well. A few years ago, they were re-building one of the roads in the downtown core in Toronto, and the entire microtrenched network (mini handholes and all) had been lifted out of the street area and laid on the sidewalk, and protected with barriers and safety cones, etc. I just shook my head…
That's exactly the way of thinking by investors during
bubble.
It should be noted that corona virus not only caused
depression against which QE policy was chosen but also
forced people stay at home.
As such, investing on internet access seemed promising
and some money was also invested on high speed inexpensive
satellite internet, even though satellite internet must
be low speed or expensive.
Except there are literally thousands of independent ISPs in the US, many 10+ years old that aren’t likely to be going anywhere and they are moving to constructing their own wireline.
