On Wednesday afternoon I received a call from our neighbour Riccardo. Apparently, some telecomms contractor has a crew in the village laying fibre for TIM (Telecom Italia). As we already have a junction box for the regular phone from which a number of neighbours receive their lines, TIM wants to install a PET junction box for the fibre connections in the same place.
You can see the current setup in these pictures. The thicker cable is coming from the telegraph pole across the street and the three or four more lightweight cables are running off to neighbouring houses. There is also some cable coming up from the ground in old metal trunking. It looks a bit of a mess to me.
The reason Riccardo has called me is because TIM needs our permission to install the new PET junction box on my house. He explained that he wants fibre at his house and is trying to persuade the contractor to continue the cable run up the street as far as his place. The contractor has agreed to do that provided Riccardo helps them to get our permission for the PET box.
So they want to install the PET junction box next to the existing one and need to dig a trench across our front garden to do that. They are trying to reach the existing pipe that is carrying their cable on the side of our house.
Do we have to agree?
No.
What happens if we choose not to?
They will terminate the cable further down the village and:
a) our neighbours will not have the option to get fibre broadband.
b) we will not have the option to get fibre broadband.
c) Riccardo will not be able to get the fibre extended to his house.
Most of our close neighbours are rather old and probably not that bothered about fibre broadband. In fact, Riccardo informed me that Mariagrazia has told the contractors she’s not even prepared to allow them to put their ladders on her property to do the work on ours. So the main person (apart from us) that would suffer would be Riccardo himself. He works from home a lot and really wants to get a fibre connection. He’s also becoming a friend and has been extremely helpful to us when we have needed it. Of course I agreed that he could send the consent form through and that I would discuss it with Fenella.
The following morning, he sent this picture he had received from the contractor’s manager to illustrate the work they intended to carry out.
My response?
“I’m not impressed with the quality of their work”
You can see the cable running untidily next to the existing trunking.
So I suggested:
“If it’s completely independent they could stick it on this pole”.
This is the telegraph pole across the street from us.
So Riccardo went back to them and said the quality of the work was unacceptable. They responded with this picture of what they “really” intended to do (to replace the existing metal pipe with new plastic trunking and to run both cables through it).
We spoke in the evening and I said we were prepared to agree provided the work was like this second picture and that they didn’t damage the roots of our Myrtle tree. I changed the text of the consent form to include the following conditions in English and Italian:
- The new and existing cables are contained within a single pipe where attached to my house.
- The route of the underground cable follows the line marked A in the attached diagram and this is done without damaging the roots of the Myrtle tree. If this can’t be done, the underground cable can follow an alternative line marked B
I sent it first to Riccardo for a sanity check and then to the contractor’s email address.
I’m a bit nervous that the work will be carried out without us being there to monitor it, but I guess that’s something we’ll have to get used to. Riccardo will monitor for us and we’ll have to opportunity to get a fibre to the home connection ourselves (potentially better than the fibre to the cabinet connection that we have in London).
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