Underground ducting to carry cable TV and Internet cables
In a welcome initiative by the Chennai Corporation, service operators have been brought together to form a consortium to lay underground ducting to carry the last mile cables for TV and Internet access in Nungambakkam. The proposal to extend this to the rest of Chennai in phases will be placed before the Chennai Corporation Council in the near future. If passed, Chennai will, in time, see the unsightly stringing of cables across poles and trees done away with. This will also make the last mile infrastructure more reliable. Currently this is being done by every service provider on an as required basis over ground. The consortium will bring order to this process by making available a common conduit for all such cabling. Kudos to the Corporation for this initiative! For this will also add immensely to the aesthetics of every area in which this is done.
Will this entail more digging up of the roads? The EB department, telecom companies, sewerage board, and now ISPs.. If Murphy’s law is anything to go by, each department will work in a completely uncoordinated fashion and exactly target roads that have been relaid after the previous organization devastated it. Underground cables will definitely improve the aesthetics of the city and should hopefully not require a lot of digging.
This is a great move. Here is a small story:
I know a person who bought his laptop recently. He went for the Sify broadband. He thought it safe to leave the broadband cable connected to the laptop. Sometime while he was asleep, the Sify cable outside broke and fell on the powerline… the power flowed through the cable to his laptop and the laptop was burnt. Even now, Sify has not got back to him. I have seen the mails he had sent. He made calls in front of me. Sify authorities deliberately ignored his calls.This was not the first instance. Sify is aware of this issue and they had already faced similar issues in Mogappair.
Hopefully with the new move, service providers would definitely be at a safer side.
Hope someone in Sify is reading this and probably they can leave a message here if they want more details.
That is probably even less likely than a lightening strike, which would have an equally disastrous effect.