Who owns holes in the ground?

damhy

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I was having a discussion with a friend earlier, who lives about 0.5mile away and we were saying how we should dig up the road and install a network, who cares if we take 10 years to install it, if companies can dig the road up so can we.

Then I had the thought, what is to stop my running my own cables along the telewest pipes that they have under the ground for their cables??? As I see it they own their cables and their pipes, but I cant see how they can own the space exists in their pipes, especially as they are running in the street which is owned by the council.

Hence if I dont damage their equipment, can I just run my own cables along side their network, saving me the cost of digging up the road.

Just thought it is an interesting conversational topic.

Damien
 

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You're barking mad, but I bet if you did it, nobody would think twice about asking who you worked for!!!

You could start three trenches, like 'Tom', 'Dick' and 'Harry' and see which one got furthest (one from each end and one from the middle...). You could even try and raise some sponsorship, and/or open a book!

I'll pay you 10p a mile. That's what I sponsor my kids!
 

damhy

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Due to the distance your 5p would come in useful. Its always a case of a couple of sponsors, giving a lot, or finding thousands sponsoring a little.

Maybe the alternative is to try and get people to subscribe to my own internet service along route. That way I could secure some income for the cabling.

Damien
 

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LOL, I think you would need some has-been celebrity to perform the ground breaking ceremony, which may give rise to a panda car or two arriving.

I think that by the time the Chief Inspecter gets off his butt and makes it down to the possible crime scene, you could have prepared the excuse that you are simply Virtual Private Network tunneling...
O-Ha
 

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damhy said:
Hence if I dont damage their equipment, can I just run my own cables along side their network, saving me the cost of digging up the road.

Are you going to train your ferret to pull the cable through ? B+Q dont supply bamboo in half mile lengths.
 

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Ah I already have that bit sussed out, cos i remember watching telewest putting the cables in in the first place. Obviously their are man hole covers every feww hundred yards, cos they need to access the cables themselves.

Their technique to run the cables was to tie a sainsbury's plasic bag to the end of the wire, place the bag in the pipe and use an air compressor to push the cable along. Obviously it works like a parachute, thats how they did it, so I could do it the same way!

Damien
 

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I would expect that laying cables in the ground needs council approval, planning permission for cables as such.

Telewest and so on will probably have to get this before digging there initial holes, after which they would be in control of their holes, they would in effect own them. If that were the case then they would be able to stop you putting your cable in their conduits.

I don’t know how accurate that is, but Telewest will have some means of stopping other people using their holes.

Out of interest what kind you cable were you talking about using?
 

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damhy said:
Ah I already have that bit sussed out, cos i remember watching telewest putting the cables in in the first place. Obviously their are man hole covers every feww hundred yards, cos they need to access the cables themselves.

Their technique to run the cables was to tie a sainsbury's plasic bag to the end of the wire, place the bag in the pipe and use an air compressor to push the cable along. Obviously it works like a parachute, thats how they did it, so I could do it the same way!

Damien

I suppose if it doesnt work you could always cut an existing cable down there and use it as a draw wire :cool:
 

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PoloMint said:
Out of interest what kind you cable were you talking about using?
According to mapquest.co.uk i live about 500m away which is less than I thought in the first place, so I cant see any reason why thick coax wouldnt work.

I'm not sure if you need planning permission to dig up the roads otherwise how would the gas board sort out a leak or any other utility come out, since making a planning application would take weeks. I think you need to make a notice in the paper to say that you are going to be digging up the road but I am not so sure if you actually need permission to do it, providing you restore the street to an almost original condition.
 

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Well I have to tell you that it is possible for a utility company to own a hole.

I worked for British Gas many moons ago, and as part of my apprenticeship I spent some time investigating and fixing leaks etc.

We were called out to a leak one day on a service pipe into an old house, but when we dug up the pavement to locate the steel pipe, it had completely corroded away, and the gas was literally flowing through a hole in the heavy clay soil. OK it was leaking a bit after several decades, but hey.

You might consider jamming some cat5 down your cooker burner. It might well come out of your m8s central heating boiler. Stranger things have happened.

Maybe not.
 

damhy

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I just thought it might be a case of you cant stick your stuff down water/gas/sewage/drain pipes cos it might cause them to block up and you'ld be responsible for that. As for cable companies and bt, they wouldnt run their stuff down eachothers pipes because they wouldnt like the other company to do it to them.
 

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On a serious note, if you were to dig up the road, the local council would flambe your butt in an instant. Several experienced folks have also died through electrocution and explosion whilst excavating something they didn't plan to.
 

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BGonaSTICK said:
On a serious note, if you were to dig up the road, the local council would flambe your butt in an instant. Several experienced folks have also died through electrocution and explosion whilst excavating something they didn't plan to.
Looks like I'll have to use black coax and run it along side telewests cables then, I get the impression (no offense to anyone) that most are just mindless technicians, that know little more than how to strip the ends of the cables and put new plugs on, and so they are unlikely to understand why a new cable has been introduced.

I guess the next step is walk around see where the channels that TW dug up lead to, it might go somewhere completely off track.

Either that or take the WiFi route, I understand some massive distances have been achieved using some homebrew antennae, just this is unlikely to work well under the circumstances, no line of site will greatly weaken the signal and even if it does work, it'll probably be slow.
 

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If you're serious about wanting to do it, and you both have broadband, why not actually use VPN?
 

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yeah we do and I immediately dismissed it.

The reason is that when you use VPN, you have to connect, so if IP addresses changed then you need to find out the address and change it all round in the settings. And also, more annoyingly when you are the VPN client you lose your connection to everything and your computer dedicates itself to the VPN. So no more surfing the net unless the person you connect to shares his connection with you.

There is a way round this of course, by modifying your LMHOST file you can trick the computer in to setting up windows sharesm although this isnt encyrypted and so could be considered stupid.

Also there is a speed problem cos we are both on TW and my upstream is 128k being on a lower package, so an alternate network would be faster.
 
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