canaduh join:2008-12-13 Kitchener, ON |
to jumpingryan
Re: S.O.S.: Bell ignorant about decaying overhead F1 cableTo draw more attention to the original intent of this topic, I'm posting some of the news images referenced in my last comment about Thursday's "unexplained" toppling of four Bell poles in Kitchener, to preserve their shock value. Hmm, y'think 50+ year old wooden poles should pass safety inspection? I wish heads would roll about this, but Bell is so huge that nobody's capable of seeing the forest for the trees. Furthermore, nobody cares until it lands on their frontyard like the people in these pictures -- well, except for me, who's been complaining for months about an identical imminent danger in my neighbourhood. @jumpingryan -- Using Renfrew County's mapping tool, that farm looks to be 20625 Hwy 17, Township of Whitewater Region. But yeah, it's hard to say with certainty whose telco distribution line it is; Bell's territory seems to be Cobden, as there's a Bell CO @ 18 Vankessel Street, but NRTC seems to cover the 613-638-XXXX Pembroke exchange, in the range of postal code K8A 6W3. Maybe you should report the broken pole to NRTC using their online form @ » www.nrtco.net/contact -- haha, if they're anything like Bell, good luck with that. Does NRTC have its own central office(s) or do they just co-locate inside one of Bell's two COs in Pembrooke? It looks as though their main switch is @ 4 Stewart Street in Beachburg. |
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I don't know what NRTC does for co-location or much about their setup....
They seem to be very selective in the locations they deliver to outside the Whitwater township. That township is actually a unique area for several utilities.... Including the Ottawa river power corporation, and NRTC.
For a while, the Whitewater township had outstanding DSL to places that you would never have suspected to have high speed.... However bell is catching up with their network updates in the rurals.
About 6 KM from me in Petawawa, NRTC has a subdivision serviced by fibre to the home.... The subdivision is form at least 2010.... FTTH then was way ahead of it's time. Their service is apparently great and I rarely hear any complaints about them about their own equipment (they are also a Bell wholesaler).
The website gives some good deals, and they don't do the bandwidth cap thing for fibre.
The are also retrofitting areas in Petawawa for FTTH, and I see quite a few signs up saying "this home now serviced by fibre".
I passed on the info and locations of the line issues to JCohen.... He is passing that onto the local area people for maintenance.
I do agree with you about slot of the safety issues regarding poles.... But I think it is indicative of society, business, and government... If it ain't broke... Don't bother with it! |
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chip89 Premium Member join:2012-07-05 Columbia Station, OH |
to jumpingryan
Well if there anything like Comcast which owns NBC and does't know what the other hands is doing.... . |
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chip89 |
to canaduh
No that's not safe... I'd complain if the pole in my backyard looked like that and was ready to smash into my house.... |
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canaduh join:2008-12-13 Kitchener, ON |
to jumpingryan
Another day, another Bell pole snaps in half here in Kitchener; watch the news clip @ » kitchener.ctvnews.ca/vid ··· ageNum=1This time, a vehicle struck one of the ancient wood poles in front of 4287 King Street East (Fionn MacCool's) that supports a very heavy Bell distribution cable, along with Rogers coax & fibre trunks. Interesting to see how quickly crews are scrambled on scene for this, yet other sidestreets in the immediate area, like the one I've reported with serious safety hazards attributible to Bell, get seemingly no attention. Maybe the cops have a special phone number for Bell network damage to report top-priority broken poles. |
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While the pole might have been old, I pretty much chalk this one up to car accident.
I actually support more above ground infastructure with Bell for most areas (maybe subdivisions they should bury, and the last connection from pole to house).
If it already has above ground infastructure (power), no reason for Bell to bury lines like they wanted to do when I got a site survey for Fibre 20/20 dedicated. They wanted to bury it the whole 9.5 KM from the CO.... despite there being above ground power (with very tall poles) all of the way.
Bill was coming in to $260,000 (yes that many zeros) for install, so I refused.
I don't believe it will even be that much when Bell brings in their own shared residential fibre..... and I hope they just follow the above ground path.
I posted a picture a while back of one of many places where Bell abandoned below ground copper for above ground lines.
Anyways, no point in rambling much more about it.... Bell probably isn't listening! LOL |
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canaduh join:2008-12-13 Kitchener, ON |
Yes, that pole was hit by a car that careened off the road, but my point was to draw attention to how inconsistently quick it was fixed. It's not as if it left wires dangling on the road, because the pole was setback and down a slight embankment, but somehow Bell and/or their agents were summoned tout-de-suite. When I made legitimate reports to Bell and city hall about a similar situation (broken pole due to a fallen tree) nothing was done for six months until I further intervened and wrote emails directly to local Bell corporate employees that I could find on LinkedIn. Something is grossly dysfunctional about this; do citizens have to call their local police and cry wolf on all of Bell's ignorance, just to get some corrective action? As for your quarter million dollar dedicated connection cost estimate, telcos and cablecos love to throw out obscene quotes for installing "custom" services. I swear they do it purely for their own amusement. Seventeen years ago, Rogers formally responded to my question about lack of service availability in my residential neighbourhood; I was, at that time, living a quarter mile from the nearest coax trunk line, with roughly a dozen houses in-between, and 15 to 20 utility poles along the run. Rogers claimed that their average costs to extend service were (sic) "$15,000 per kilometre for overhead and $27,000 per kilometre for underground construction" and had to be borne by lowly old me if I wanted their oh-so-wonderful service. Pfff, right. As if any sensible individual would cough up that kind of money, eh. Extrapolating their numbers would suggest that my city alone must have trillions of dollars invested by Rogers: obviously that's not the case. Returning to an earlier distraction about the "garbage bag" pedestal box covers, how many years is long enough to elapse for these 'temporary' fixes before permanent rigid replacements are installed? Here's one on major arterial road, Weber Street East, in Kitchener @ » goo.gl/maps/ps2WU -- in fact, very near where DSLR user and Bell tech JMC1 lives, although he hasn't posted in ages. This orange "garbage bag" has been there at least as far back as the latest Google StreetView image, so 1.5 years, and the old aluminum pedestal can be seen deteriorating in the Aug. 2011 imagery, so it's safe to assume the "garbage bag" has been there for 2+ years. The "garbage bag" bandaid solution has been in place so long, in fact, that the orange colour is now noticeably faded from sun exposure. |
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said by canaduh:As for your quarter million dollar dedicated connection cost estimate, telcos and cablecos love to throw out obscene quotes for installing "custom" services. Cogeco, which is far closer to me, just provides "guessimates" when it comes to expansion of their services..... My big issue with them, is I am so very close to both Cogeco and Bell Fibre... but no expansion in sight. I have no chance of putting up a wireless point to point setup either... far too tall trees (150 feet or more) I would understand if I was tens of KM's away, but not 2 to 3. Anyways..... said by canaduh:Returning to an earlier distraction about the "garbage bag" pedestal box covers, how many years is long enough to elapse for these 'temporary' fixes before permanent rigid replacements are installed? Here's one on major arterial road, Weber Street East, in Kitchener @ »goo.gl/maps/ps2WU -- in fact, very near where DSLR user and Bell tech JMC1 lives, although he hasn't posted in ages. I do see the garbage bag stuff quite alot, but it is what is underneath it that counts.... in some cases there is a decent job splicing.... in my case, not so good (you can see the mess)! LOL |
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JSEJSEyo join:2014-05-16 Nova Scotia ·Bell Aliant Fibr..
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to canaduh
Where we live, Aliant doesn't exactly do the best job maintaining their lines either. There's a stretch of phone line where there is no electricity or houses for about 2KM and trees laying on the wire in multiple locations. It's been like that for years, nothing has been done about it.
The line is sagging in a few locations, one was in front of a friends house. He complained that they took tie straps and tied the line to the cable above it haha.
There's also another place where we had a power outage on Christmas eve of 2010(?) where a tree fell through the power lines. The power company came and fixed it, cut the top off the tree, and laid the rest of the tree on the phone wire. Still there to this day. Nobody does anything.
Splice box wide open down the road that knocks out the phone of a number of houses, people complain, they wont even close it!
It's annoying. I called and told them about the trees on their wires last month, they did nothing about it. I should post pictures haha. |
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said by JSE:Where we live, Aliant doesn't exactly do the best job maintaining their lines either. There's a stretch of phone line where there is no electricity or houses for about 2KM and trees laying on the wire in multiple locations. It's been like that for years, nothing has been done about it. I am assuming your east coast? Aliant is pretty much now all Bell, although I am not too sure when the deal is final? As to the rest of your comments... I am often amazing at the quality of work from many workers... particularly the union types. Little supervision, and little consequences for poor workmanship..... but it is everywhere. |
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canaduh join:2008-12-13 Kitchener, ON |
Well, Avertex showed up, today, in -10°C windchill no less, with one of those Vermeer horizontal directional drilling machines and four workers. They installed a flexible underground conduit from the first pole on the sidestreet to the pole that has the JWI mounted to it. From Bell's fleet yard over at 998 Wilson Avenue, they brought a reel of Superior Essex OSP cable, fished it in the new conduit, and put a new pedestal right against the first pole that presumably will be removed once a splicing crew makes their rounds. I have to wonder if this is really to rectify the sagging F1 cable that I reported, or part of coincidental utility relocation works in preparation for a new sanitary sewer forcemain that's supposed to go down this street in a year or two. Maybe they realized it actually costs just as much to bury the line than to hack away the jungle of vegetation that's grown all around the old aerial line, and to have to replace two poles. But it's certainly gonna be a zigzagging multisplice run -- within half a kilometre, the line emerges from underground to a brief aerial span, then back underground to the cross to the other side of the street, spliced at a new pedestal, then underneath the sidestreet twice over, then up a pole to the JWI, then back underground to F2 circuits. |
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JSEJSEyo join:2014-05-16 Nova Scotia ·Bell Aliant Fibr..
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to jumpingryan
said by jumpingryan:I am assuming your east coast? Aliant is pretty much now all Bell, although I am not too sure when the deal is final?
As to the rest of your comments... I am often amazing at the quality of work from many workers... particularly the union types. Little supervision, and little consequences for poor workmanship..... but it is everywhere. Yep, Nova Scotia to be exact. As far as I know, the BCE deal is complete now. Would be nice if it meant there would be more maintenance on the lines, but considering that Bell isn't doing any better job out west, I doubt we'd see much change here. There's a stretch on route 340 of NS as well where there's a pole leaning hard. Wouldn't say 45 degrees but close to it haha. We made the joke that if the lines wasn't there holding the pole up it would be in the road. It's been like that all summer, but it holds not only the phone line, but electrical, cable and t1 as well. Not sure whose responsibility it is to maintain the poles or I'd complain to them (the power company?) about that one since it's leaning really really hard. For the problems here I'm not sure I'd blame it on the workers per se but the fact that the company itself seems to cheap to hire some people to groom the lines. Though maybe I'm wrong, maybe they do hire people like that around here they just never leave the office or something haha. There's the odd tech that goes on house calls whenever someone complains about a problem but nobody that I know of that just drives around looking for (potential) problems. |
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JC_ Premium Member join:2010-10-19 Nepean, ON |
JC_
Premium Member
2014-Dec-28 7:17 pm
If there is electrical lines on the pole, call the power company as they are usually the owners of the pole. |
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to JSE
Technically, all of us employees are supposed to report any defects we see, but we can only see what appears within the course of our normal business. No one is paid to drive around and look for defects, just report them as we see them. However even for us, it takes about 60 days for someone to even come inspect what we have reported, let alone fix it. So i can only imagine how long it would take for a member of the public to get something resolved.
The police however do in fact have direct numbers for all utilities for instances of low hanging wires, broken poles, etc and the call is then distributed to what ever department is required. |
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JSEJSEyo join:2014-05-16 Nova Scotia ·Bell Aliant Fibr..
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JSE
Member
2014-Dec-30 8:02 am
Where it's located it's in an area where there is a stretch of no houses, so it's a little hard to tell someone on the phone who has no idea what "Route 340" even is haha. It's a stretch of wetland, hence why the pole is leaning so hard now. A few years ago it happened to another pole but they came and fixed it quick, this time it hasn't. On google maps it's this pole here: » www.google.ca/maps/@44.3 ··· tkKQ!2e0It's slightly leaning even then, but now it leans even harder haha. |
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to canaduh
Anon
2015-Jan-1 10:55 am
to canaduh
(topic move) S.O.S.: Bell ignorant about decaying overhead F1 cableModerator ActionThe post that was here, has been moved to a new topic .. » S.O.S.: Bell ignorant about decaying overhead F1 cable |
actions · 2015-Jan-1 10:55 am · (locked) |