In the week Elon Musk has become a trillionaire, it should be source of international embarrassment that the British state is investing in archaic digital communications systems. Up and down the countryside, hedgerows and field margins are being blighted with 20th century comms equipment. In the new age of LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites, Starlink and other wireless internet solutions, the British state – 30 years too late – is investing in the rollout of telegraph poles and thick black wires to mar our once green and pleasant land.
A line of planning notices on flimsy sticks appeared a couple of months ago along an unspoilt piece of Hampshire hedgerow warning severely of the imminent erection of a line of telegraph poles. The letter followed warning of local lane closures: “We’re expanding our full fibre broadband network across the South East, bringing fast and reliable connectively to local communities.” It was, insanely, dated May 2026, rather than May 1999. The kind folk of Trooli have finally decided that our quiet corner of Hampshire is deserving of the internet. The erection of such infrastructure seems as harebrained as digging canals in the age of rail. Telegraph poles in 2026, what on earth is going on?
When we moved into our hamlet nine years ago, neighbours warned of a single BT box at the bottom of the hill and a single underground wire that serviced the sparsely populated lanes with limited success. Streaming a film was impossible. Thankfully, a local farmer had set up a microwave internet service and we all installed mini dishes and bounced the signal off each other. Unless rain damped the central junction, it worked until Starlink came on stream in 2023. The majority of houses in the village now have Elon’s lifesaving rectangular screen attached to an upper window, roof or chimney. It has never failed. Yes it’s expensive (£70 a month) but I’ve no doubt it would be cheaper to supply individual rural households with Starlink than doing what the Government is doing instead: paying firms to install telegraph poles!
Are these old fashioned telegraph poles all that is available to poor diminished Britain because, as Dominic Cummings pointed out, “In 2020 we also bought LEO satellites. SWI laughed… Whitehall sold off the satellites!”?
Why is Trooli not burying the unsightly black fibre wires to save the visual integrity of a beautiful lane? When I moaned to our local councillor, she replied:
Trooli has a contract to deliver fibre to the premise for rural areas, and many companies have installed poles rather than deal with the ecological harm of digging in cabling. Although Starlink is impressive, many people choose not to use it for ethical reasons.
A tiny bit of digging reveals that this decades-late rollout of soon to be redundant technology is thanks to the usual combination of spigot-like excessive guaranteed Government funding combined with cheapskate private equity. As part of a £5 billion scheme run by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme seems to explain things:
The majority of Project Gigabit delivery will be through major contracts, providing subsidies to suppliers to extend their gigabit-capable networks to premises that are unlikely to be reached otherwise.
These generous “subsidies to suppliers” have been leapt on by companies – often backed by private equity – such as Trooli, Gigaclear, Wildanet, Airband and many others, who then install visually unappealing and surely soon to be redundant infrastructure. Trooli is owned by Agnar UK Infrastructure, controlled by Vauban Infrastructure Partners. Just like so many insane areas of the British state – social care, social housing, SEND private contractors – the UK rural fibre sector attracts enormous amounts of private equity capital, mostly from European and US funds, because over the long-term government subsidies de-risk their investments and provide guaranteed income. While allowing the Government to tick a box saying that ‘reliable rural broadband’ has been achieved, there is no concern for how visually shoddy it is and indeed how the whole infrastructure will become obsolete in a world where LEO communications become widely adopted. I understand that BT whistleblower Mike Kiely shared details of how BT rinsed the government on its broadband rollout – will others one day come forward from these backward rural rollout firms?
I would vote for a party which pledges to improve rather than degrade our visual landscape, which prioritises the integrity of beauty and doesn’t spaff government funds all over cheapskate private equity-backed firms who put up telegraph poles in 2026 FFS.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
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Why is no one talking about the cell towers every fifty feet along the motorway, in every town and city. What are they supposed to be used for. Anybody know.
Not just the poles are unsightly!
We were recently looking for somewhere to go in our caravan…. we now to be aware of a problem whereby looking at a map of the area of interest – there are massive areas of solar panel fields! Yuk! Not going there! That’s hardly a place of unspoilt nature!
What is it with these half wits! Why are they h… bent on destroying the countryside?
I like telegraph poles they are part of the rural features of our country. What’s wrong with using old technology to help the new? Think you’re being a tad pernickety Joanna.
Bit of nimbyism there me thinks, be grateful its a telegraph pole and not another dreary block of flats filled with gimmigrants, or a eye wateringly expense windfarm!
I agree or those monstrous pylons.
I may be alone, and living in a very rural area, I am happy to see telegraph poles in the hedgerows to deliver a better broadband service. I dislike pylons and wind turbines but poles are not too intrusive on the landscape.
And besides, the poles give a great perch and vantage point for buzzards, owls etc.
Exactly, me thinks the lady doth protest too much.
Glass fibre was installed in a part of NL (quite rural). Minimal digging as a ‘mole’ was used shooting the line underground.
None of our parties will introvert the countryside because it’s racist and upsets broen people.
At the root of any problem is Government.
Replacing copper connexions with high bandwidth fibre is capital intensive as it’s not just the cable but exchanges, road-side cabinets and installation to the wall socket.
Where population density is low, the revenue generated is insufficient to cover cost and give a return on the investment.
Insisting (Government) that every part of Britain must have high bandwidth fibre inevitably means service providers will choose least capital intensive option.
Putting cable underground in rural locations would involve digging up the road or trying to lay them underneath the roadside verges. This would present a number of problems.
Roads have other services beneath them, water, sewage, gas, electricity which would have to be avoided. Difficult.
Channelling under the grass verge would cut roots of hedges and trees killing them.
However. If there already was an underground conduit carrying copper wire, the question arises why could this not be used to pass fibre optic cabling? This is what happens in towns and cities to avoid digging up roads and pavements.
But if it is BT property then perhaps Trooli cannot use it, and probably didn’t want to pay… Read more »
Bit if a stretch to call fibre ‘obsolete infrastructure’ just because you don’t like the telegraph poles it’s strung along…
It’ll work just fine and is capable of vast speeds, using something wired over wireless is always my preference… Starlink is impressive, but it ain’t cheap keeping that amount of satellites in orbit, where we can use a wired solution, we should…
So do the haters think that street lights need to go too. They are not only ugly they are involved in traffic accidents frequently.
If this worries people they should perhaps have a look at cities elsewhere. I was in Bangkok recently and all supplies were strung from poles; there was however very little disruption due to roads being repeatedly dug up for access.
The despoiling of the countryside is insane, whether for telegraph poles or windmill power lines, because we are, for some reason, not able to put them in the ground at a price to make the service cost effective. The situation is even more insane in towns, where perfectly good underground trunking is in place, but these Government funded shysters are not prepared to negotiate with the owners, Openreach, so they are shoving poles on footpaths and in some cases people’s gardens, without seeking prior permission, under Government critical infrastructure authorities. But heyho, as long as the Government is happy spaffing our money on these charlatans, who cares 😡
Money. In areas where BT Openreach have the old style telephone poles, they have strung along modern fibre optic cable along between them and to the properties with their customers, rather than digging up the ground for installation and ongoing maintenance.
Similar story with power (as the image attached shows part of the distribution network) where older overhead cabling is in use, rather than changing to buried cable in rural and older suburbs.
Similar problem of state incompetence over mobile phone signals. Brown took £billions from the providers as license fees which was money they then did not have to invest in good coverage. OffCom is incompetent so even 4G signals are unstable on main line rail route, trunk and motorways and even in places within central London.
In rural areas it is never good.
Why is this article about Telegraph Poles illustrated with a photograph that prominently displays power-line poles carrying electricity ?
Unnecessry ugliness! Fibre to the premises is not needed. Keep copper landlines for these purposes. They are the only secure and reliable option especially in internet or electricity outages. Talk Talk Business provide this option until 2030 and I’ll be using that.
https://www.openreach.com/news-and-opinion/2023/openreach-change-telephone-network is pretty much what is happening. Now it may not be possible to make emergency calls locally, depending on the area of a fault (assuming that your mobile battery has enough charge for it to work).
I’m quite fond of telegraph poles but agree that it seems silly to insist on a wired solution when a wireless solution exists. I am puzzled as to why more telegraph poles are required though. When we got fibre to our home a couple of years ago, it was via the telegraph pole that already served our part of the street. Surely all homes have a phone line so the poles would already be there?
Land owners are not so keen on poles. They occupy more space than you might think because cultivation (even grass cutting) up close is difficult or too costly. Trees growing nearby are regularly butchered by the National Grid staff and cut branches left in the hedgerow.
National Grid are meant to pay rent for the pole but they have been inefficient for years. Missed payments, payment in arrears, payment by paper cheque (do they hope we will lose them).
Thanks for the info. Ours is on the council owned grass verge but yes down the road where the farms start they are on the edge of fields.
Back in the 1990s, a construction crew was replacing about a dozen telegraph poles which were in poor condition along the lane where I lived.
I got chatting with the man managing the operation who told me it cost £1 000 per pole. I expect a telegraph pole costs a lot more these days.
Or maybe it’s because the government needs to have full control of this infrastructure (via licences?) for surveillance and other overreach powers 🙂
“Although Starlink is impressive, many people choose not to use it for ethical reasons.”
Translation : I don’t like Elon Musk
Yes, I am sure those same people never buy anything made in China or made with oil from countries with poor human rights records.
Yes, also noted. Gets a mention in: https://rumble.com/v7bh3a8-elon-musk-trillionaire-in-the-tank-podcast-541.html?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Elon%20Musk%2C%20Trillionaire%20-%20In%20the%20Tank%20Podcast%20%23541&utm_campaign=In%20the%20Tank%20%2806-11-26%29%20%28Copy%29
I’d not heard of the Heartland Institute. Climate deniers, according to Wikipedia. I don’t really use Rumble but I do remember that my fellow posters on the Lockdown Sceptics subreddit often have to break up links to Rumble and Zerohedge because Reddit bots just get rid of the posts otherwise.
Exactly, The MDS is strong with people.
We’ve had starlink from the beta testing stage 4 years ago and it’s never let us down, it’s the best connection we’ve had.
We’re well out in the wilds of West Cork and there’s not really any other option (national broadband is coming but max 50mb per second, we get 2-300mbs!)
Its €55 (£48) per month here which for this kind of long term reliable service is great
Couldn’t give a monkeys about Elon Musks political beliefs!😆
My experience is the same, although I must admit that the chief executive does affect my decisions as I will never buy a Dyson product, but mainly because the are vastly over-priced and not particulalry reliable.
I’ve had nothing but joy from my various Dyson appliances over the years
Quite. The virtue signalling twats were out in their millions buying Tesla’s until Musk unveiled himself as the second coming of Hitler, then they all threw their keys in the bin. Turns out the virtue gained from disliking Musk was worth more virtue than saving the planet; they’re the people we’re dealing with.
Do you like the boss of BT?
Some people have a strange idea about what “ethical” means. Usually they mean “hate”.
Her councillor is clearly a Leftist, Lib Dumb, no doubt