Comment by londons_explore
Comment by londons_explore 2 days ago
Cables don't move often. Why not simply have a map of all of them?
Google sell maps of things like this from street view data.
Comment by londons_explore 2 days ago
Cables don't move often. Why not simply have a map of all of them?
Google sell maps of things like this from street view data.
Any one particular cable might not move often, but if a telco owns N bucket trucks it's a safe bet that about N cables move every workday.
Telcos are notoriously secretive about the location of their fiber. They even got most state legislatures to exempt it from state-level FOIA laws.
Most "utility pole maps" only show poles with power lines on them.
A ton of telco cables are on telco-only poles (basically just a really straight tree trunk shoved in the ground, no cross-arms at all).
it's an approximation of dangerous areas, catenary curves are more accurate than straight lines but you don't know the length of the cable so you don't know the droop height.
All cables? Everywhere in the entire country? Accurate to the centimeter level and updated on the hour?
Edit: This was flippant, but the real issues are: any map you get will be incomplete and obsolete almost immediately and cables move and sway in the breeze.
OpenStreetMap supports annotating poles and theirs cables. It's common for power lines (local and long distance). There are also annotations for communication lines (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:communication%3Dline).
There are also public and proprietary "aviation obstacle" databases across the world.