There are joint boxes where they are required. There aren't many of them as there's not that much jointing to do.

100mm is a defective depth and, aside from the Toby box, the rest should be deeper.

I did get 300mm wrong, though, it's minimum coverage of 250mm, 260mm in Scotland, in footways and 450mm in carriageways.

They are using 8mm BFTs between cabinets and properties. Not much in it between BFTs and a rather thinly walled duct in terms of protection I would imagine.

What VM are doing is pretty much standard fare all things considered. If there are fibre breaks and there's no redundancy they'll excavate an inspection cover on top presumably. They've ample fibre capacity to the cabinets, don't care about future expansion capability as they don't have to sell spare duct space, and aren't operating under the conditions BT are.

So not much to see really.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

I agree, RONSKI . I just thought it worth pointing out that we have a lot of really slipshod work here too.

Much as I respect and admire Ignitionnet and his posts in general, I did feel it was a little complacent to restrict the criticism to roads and pavements, saying it doesn�t happen here.

I'm simply quoting the regulations. If cables are going in at that kind of depth the local authority should be forcing them to be reburied and the contractor will be in a world of hurt as the local authority can and do core drill the reinstatements.

People commenting on the install between the Toby / swept-tee and their home is a different matter entirely and entirely irrelevant.

EDIT: The link I was responding to actually says the following in the very first paragraph making it clear where the criticism was:

Google Fiber will turn off its network in Louisville, Kentucky and exit the city after a series of fiber installation failures left cables exposed in the roads.

It also links to https://www.cnet.com/news/google-fibers-secret-weapo...

I entirely fail to see the relevance of the installation that traverses the garden itself to these network construction issues. I'm sure you could find examples of bad overhead network which itself has about as much to do with the topic at hand as the installation to the property.

I appreciate you are our local pedant but you've misfired with the pedantry here by trying to pick holes in something no-one said.

Edited by deleted (Tue 12-Feb-19 13:32:43)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

I don�t know about that.

There are many examples of recent Virgin (copper from the pavement hole) installations on our estate that are effectively surface-laid in their plasticky tubing in gardens.

Not gardening-safe and even more vandal-prone than the ground level wires to the wall box on the houses. Looks a mess, quite apart from anything else.

The initial post was about shallow trenching in public paths and highways. There are no regulations on what happens to the cable once it leaves the public highway and it's quite irrelevant to Google's dubious practices.

Unless there are cars and trucks driving across gardens with cable underneath them the same issues shouldn't be seen.

I wonder if Google were trying to be clever and copy these guys, didn't want to pay them for it to be done properly and messed it up?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QStbRdFF0M

https://www.nano-trench.com/en/homepage.html

That looks like a solid solution - 2 microducts above the actual fibre microduct, decent protection, one of those ducts with metal in it for easier tracing.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

https://www.nano-trench.com/en/homepage.html

The logo on the front page suggests you can use it for transatlantic and trans-pacific links - impressive!

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

I appreciate you are our local pedant but you've misfired with the pedantry here by trying to pick holes in something no-one said.

I was not intending to be confrontational. This reply of yours seems to me to be deliberately so, and insulting to boot.

Disagreeing with my post, which you have done several times and at some length in this thread is one thing. This is quite another .

Nor did you quote any regulations in your first post, the one I responded to. You made what seemed to me a generalised statement about the protection of shallow underground cabling in the UK.

My apologies for unintentionally annoying you.

In reply to a post by partial:

Think you are being a tad optimistic at 300mm. In my manor Virgin Lightning is doing well if you get 100mm with no duct and no joint boxes.

Surprisingly poor build with no protection and no future expansion capability.

Talking of microtrenching: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/02/openre...

I Know, maybe I already knew, sure sign we are entering the mania phase of the bubble.

What does that mean?

In reply to a post by partial:

I Know, maybe I already knew, sure sign we are entering the mania phase of the bubble.

Or that technology has moved on from standard trenching and even Openreach are ready to take advantage.

It's been used with few issues all over the world. Google just pushed it too far.