Painting external fibre cable - potential problems?

We had FTTP fibre installed yesterday and the wife isn't very happy about the runs of black cable across the outside (light coloured) walls of the house, to be fair it does look pretty ugly.

I can paint them the same colour as the masonry but does that leave me open to any future problems being batted away by Openreach, claiming my intervention makes me liable for repair costs?

I know it seems pretty unlikely and I'm sure cables on walls must get painted all the time but it just had me wondering.

I'm thinking even if such a scenario were to arise it would probably be worth me swallowing the expense rather than suffering ongoing domestic wrath, assuming any resulting costs aren't massively high?
In which case I'd need to weigh that up against cost of divorce!

On a side note this installation was under Uno who I have to say were incredibly responsive and helpful to support tickets from me leading upto and throughout the install so big thumbs up for them.

Edited by deleted (Tue 27-Apr-21 10:54:54)

You’ll be OK to paint the cable.

Obviously, be a little gentle around it, but otherwise, it’ll be fine.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

You’ll be OK to paint the cable.

Obviously, be a little gentle around it, but otherwise, it’ll be fine.

Thanks, I'll avoid going at it with force!

Don't forget to tell your wife that painted cable slows down the internet speed for social media and streaming soaps.

As in don't bang the ladder against it or hang the paint-pot from it 😂.

In reply to a post by MHC:

Don't forget to tell your wife that painted cable slows down the internet speed for social media and streaming soaps.

Haha, not sure if threats to social media and soaps will worry her but a targeted slowing down of gardening related streams might!

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

As in don't bang the ladder against it or hang the paint-pot from it 😂.

Fibre with a decent jacket stands up to far more than you'd expect.

Dirt on or damage to the connector end-face is a different matter. I'd be quite interested to see how manufacturers test PON equipment - obviously with various long reels of fibre, attenuators etc. to simulate real world PONs, but if I was buying I'd want to see what happens when all the customer premise connectors have been abused, fitted with reflectors, filled with water, attached to standard SFPs on the same wavelengths and so on. I'm sure it has been done.

In theory everyone's connector should stay in their ONT until such time as Openreach have cause to replace the ONT, but I wonder how many people will take it with them on vacating a property. It should really have a notice on it saying 'do not remove from installation address' or similar.

The new-build ONT enclosures should help with this, they feel like part of the fabric of the building rather than just another router.

A subset of those properties will stuff the unprotected connector back in the wall when redecorating, probably oblivious as they take service from VM or an altnet. Years later they will move on and the new owner of the property will spend hours on the phone to their CP who has sent a self-install router telling them there really is no ONT or cable...