Serious trip hazard.

[truenorth179]

What a mess.  This is a Rogers box on Sandford Fleming Drive in Waterloo Ontario.  The white wire crosses the street and services a house three or four down the street.  The black wire was installed this week and services a house across the street.  The box is apart and the cables are above ground beside a sidewalk. Kids race down this street and could easily get hurt by this.

Now I feel for Rogers.  The infrastructure on this street was installed forty years ago.  It's all waterlogged and rotten which is why these cables are in the trees.  When your system has to be strung through the trees it's time to do something about it.  But it's probably a ten thousand dollar cost which will never be recovered.  Time to Call Elon Musk?

*** Edited Labels ***

[Charles1234]

I’ve got these all around my neighborhood, matter of fact I have one on my property going up a light post, through my tree, to my neighbours house two doors down, wrapped around their downspout and into their home. 

[50sreader]

These unsightly disasters in waiting are everywhere and owned by both Rogers and Bell. There should be a corporate responsibility whereby they accept the costs of cleaning up their act.

[RogersZia]

Good evening @truenorth179,

Welcome to the Community!

At Rogers safety is one of our main priorities, I appreciate that you've brought it up to our attention. This has been directed to the team in charge. We're certain it will be addressed in an efficient manner.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

RogersZia

[Gdkitty]

Any of these types of run, are only meant to be TEMPORARY.. pretty much to see if it fixes the users issues (or a new setup where they cant get it up on the old wires, again due to an issue).

There is a cable bury team, which is supposed to do a more permanent connection.
which is something that can be escalated by the customer to get it done.

but generally has to be the person who's line it is connected to.  (you couldnt escalate it for a neighbor) 

[Datalink]

And that continues to be a problem for homeowners, some who don't even have Rogers accounts, who end up with Rogers cables strung across their yard, thru trees, up onto downspouts, strung low over driveways, etc, etc.  We've seen numerous posts like that over the years.  There are right ways to run temporary cables, and wrong ways to run temporary cables.  Leaving cables lying around which become hazards is just plain laziness.  

[truenorth179]

The trip hazard tale continues.

Check the picture at the top of this thread.  To recap, the rogers distribution box near me was apart and the cables were at knee height between it and the nearby street light post.  The white cable runs through two trees and across the road to a house 250 feet away.  This cable has been in the trees for three years.

The black cable was strung through the trees about a week ago and this operation left the box cover askew.  It runs through two trees, to a house across the street.  Right after I took the picture, a garbage truck hit the cable and brought it down.  Not high enough.  The contractor that came out to check out the trip hazard was then looking at a much bigger problem.

The neighbourhood stood by and watched the tennis ball throwing to try and get the cable into tree branches much higher.  The contractors assured us that it would be buried within six weeks, a promise that he probably shouldn’t be making.

More background; the internet and television field distribution industry comprises two main companies.  We’ll call them the Red Team and the Blue Team.  In this neighbourhood, the Blue Team installed a fibre optic distribution node just up the street a few years ago.  They then dispatched a smart looking team of young people in blue shirts to work the streets , promoting something called “Fibe”.  They were pretty successful, and the Red Team lost some customers in these parts.

Some questions.  Pretend that you’re the local Rogers Field Infrastructure Manager. 

It seems that the white cable, which has been in the trees for three years might not be servicing a customer.  It may be that customer canceled service a couple years ago.  This cable was left behind and it is likely that there was no mechanism to notify you that an orphan cable is still up in the trees on a canceled account.  Do you dispatch a contractor to pull this down now that you know this? 

The black wire customer account is still active even after being out of service twice in the past week.  This is a neighbourhood with all services buried, electricity, telephone and cable TV.  Putting the customer’s cable underground will require extensive locates and delicate below ground tunneling to avoid all the other cables down there.  This is going to cost real money just to put one customer underground.  Do you do this or just leave it in the trees?  If you get the construction crews in here, do you repair all the severed cables to houses that aren’t currently customers?  After all, this is a business with significant churn.  With the right promotions some of these might be back.

What’s the right answers?

Check the picture, it sure doesn’t look like this is bolted down for the long haul.  The eight year old boys on the street will pound this into submission.

[truenorth179]

You might wonder why I’m passionate about cables through the trees, lamp poles, evestroughs etc.

This goes way back.  A long time ago I was working for a Canadian engineering company in Saudi Arabia.  The town I was living in, Taif, population about 80k then, was installing or perhaps upgrading a Northern Telecom telephone switch, an SP-1 crossbar switch.  Expatriate Canadians in foreign lands find each other. There was a Northern Telecom / Bell Canada group in town to support this switch and of course I met them and hung out with them a bit.  I got to see the switch which was installed in the Saudi Arabia Telecommunications Ministry building in the centre of town.  It was huge.

Telephone was fairly new technology in Saudi Arabia. This was way before cellphones. Saudi women, who lived a kind of restricted life, just loved talking on the phone.  The government set the price for telephone service pretty close to zero which they could do because you folks were buying a lot of gasoline distilled from Saudi oil.  There was a huge demand for telephone service.  The industry in Saudi Arabia was in its infancy.  They had no real idea or standards on how to engineer field infrastructure to support an SP-1 switch.  Bundles of wires came out of that building and were strung across the tops of buildings, on the few poles that were installed, along the walls and across the ground in places.  To my engineer’s eye this was a formula for network failures.  No wonder the system was unstable and unreliable.

I looked at those wires and just shook my head.  What a mess.  The rooftops in the centre of town were strung with black wires.  When a car drove over a wire and severed it, they just pulled a new one.  It’s a wonder the whole thing worked at all.  My company’s office had a telephone and several of us followed the line back into town and hardened it where we could.  We achieved some reliability, but we often repaired it ourselves.

Now I bring you to a modern Canadian subdivision.  My street was designed with all services buried.  All electrical cables, telephone cables and cable TV cables are all underground.  But that was in 1980.  The TV and telephone cables are all waterlogged and rotten.  The feeds to each house were not buried deep enough.  It is known that winters, water, and ground heaving will push a cable up.  The Rogers cables are now just inches down or even on the surface in a lot of places.  Last year I was edging my lawn next to the sidewalk, and I severed my neighbour’s cable.  It was about an inch down.  The contractors Rogers uses are paid for each call and burying things correctly is not in their knowledgebase. 

So, when I see cables in the trees and across the lawns I see red.  Rogers, by stringing cables through the trees, has degraded our neighbourhood and introduced network instability.  I’ve heard firsthand that internet instability and pixelated tv images have caused defections.

What to do?  Rogers thinks that Ignite can be compelling, but given what I see in the trees, I wouldn’t touch it. The bandwidth won’t support that here.  Real money must be spent in the ground to be successful here.