More expensive to build. That doesn’t get offset by accidents and whatever. Also harder to repair in case something really is broken with it.
Don’t know why they don’t this in your place. Here, power, phone, fiber, everything is underground for years now.
Some unprepared countries tried this, in an effort to modernize. Without interdeparrment communication, good documentation, coordination, signage and, well, maps that included depth data that are maintained and updated in real time, yould have frequent outages each time one works department or private contractor did some digging in an inocuous patch.
Source: am malaysian.
The poors get overhead lines, the wealthy get underground
In the city i live in (Victoria, BC) the wealthiest part of town has buried lines. Everywhere else, they’re on poles.
Why weren’t telephone lines and electrical lines not buried under ground?
I guess Dickle has no time for proofreading because need to post 10 times a day
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In Australia our power lines are mostly aerial, but telephone/broadband lines are mostly underground.
Before hydraulics digging was hard AF. And it’s still cheaper to put them on poles.
That’s exactly what’s happening where I am. Wildfire danger is so high they have to shut down city power every time there’s serious wind, as there aren’t enough fire services to cover all the potential fires from downed lines. Now a good chunk of tax dollars are going to moving lines underground, though arguably it’ll take some time.
This is just a guess, but I think it might be because not everyone needed or had a phone at first.
They only connected a few important buildings at first, and then started tying in more. If they had started underground, they’d have to dig up the streets every time someone bought their first telephone.
Which would have saved a bunch of money from upkeep and accidents?
That’s highly debatable. Putting something in the ground instead of the air just adds a different set of factors eating away at the cables. Accidents happen underground as well as above. Excavators or farming equipment regularly cut cables buried in fields or at construction sites. The deeper you bury cables to avoid that the higher the cost gets. Also maintaining a network of buried cables has its own problems: Want to know where an overland power line was cut? Just look where the cable dropped. Want to know where a buried line broke? Start digging up the whole strand between the two transfer points.
Overall: Overland lines are cheaper and easier to maintain.
Under ground cabling has a shorter lifespan than above ground and are harder to access due to limited access points for maintenance. They are also prone to things like flooding and tree roots. Still look a heck of a lot better than above ground, though.
Thats not true - underground cabling has a longer lifespan as they’re protected from rainfall, surface temperatures and UV. Tree roots and flooding is a factor of maintenance and location. E.g. an inner city location is unlikely to experience flooding and roots can be guided away from cables as they follow path of least resistance.
In much of Europe, buried cables is the norm, and they co-locate with buried gas and water supplies. Telephone cables were the one exception but with fibre optic cables even that is largely underground now especially in dense urban areas.
Old copper telephone lines werent buried for convenience as they were easy to install out to new properties as and when needed. Every house needed water and electricity but telephone connections varied, and some buildings needed multiple. But this was just from pole to home. The poles connected to cabinets on a street and the rest of the network of trunks were buried, at least in much of Europe.
It does cost more initially but with the benefit of lower cost in maintenance long term.
In Japan cables are often above ground, but presumably because of Earthquake risk. In the US I dont know why buried cables is less common. Possibly because many utilities were private and so went for short term cheaper costs? Most European utilities were public owned - and even if now privatised, the expectation remains burying.
I was always taught maintenance wise that the insulation around underground cabling (which is necessary since earth is a great conductor) degrades and leads to a shorter maintanable life for the cables than above ground ones. I could be wrong, though.
