Rudman's city: New holes to give access to the old holes

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Two weeks ago, when sandwich boards were finally expelled from downtown there was no time to celebrate.

Instead of luxuriating in the newly opened up pavements, we pedestrians were too busy trying not to fall down the holes left by teams of telecommunication ditch-diggers.

In recent days though, as the fibre-optic cablers have retreated from the Queen Street valley, the central business district has at last been in danger of becoming pedestrian friendly.

But don't start kicking up your heels just yet. In the topsy turvy world of fibre-optic telecommunications, what goes down sometimes has to come up again.

And that is what is soon to happen in downtown Auckland. No sooner has CityLink - one of the four telcos now burying cable ducts around the inner city - covered up its business than it is sharpening up its spades for a return to the same trenches.

It seems that people who are paid much more than you and I, decided not to install access holes to the buried ducts when they were put in place.

Instead the plastic tubes were laid and covered, first with fill then with a bitumen road surface or footpath paving material.

Now CityLink has to go back, dig up the oh-so-recently disturbed road or footpath, and excavate the required access shafts. Only then will it be able to feed into the ducts the fibre-optic cables that were the point of the whole exercise.

The good news for pedestrians is that most of the 25 new holes will be on the roadway. Which is small comfort to the long-suffering motorist.

And the disruption does not end there. Each time one of the five telecommunications providers scores a new client or building, the pavement and/or roadway will have to be dug up to make the connection.

The cabling of inner Auckland in recent months, has uncovered some of the absurdities of the free market.

A while back, I questioned the rationality of creating three fibre optic networks when one, possibly a shared one, was more than enough for our needs.

But it's even crazier than that. At last count, five competing networks, not three, were either installed or being laid.

As well as Telecom there's TelstraSaturn, CityLink, Tangent (a Vector subsidiary) and United Networks. United is using the 19th century gas mains as its ducting. The other three newcomers have, by law, a fairly free right to bury their pipes when and where they want.

Des Hughes, Auckland City's manager of utility relationships, persuaded them to co-operate as best he could. By his insistence on trench-sharing, the city's streets got at worst, four new trenches instead of a possible eight.

Sharing trenches was one thing. But the telcos drew the line at sharing access holes. What went on inside them was just too secret to share.

CityLink's ducting was laid by TelstraSaturn, which sensibly installed its own access holes. But CityLink told Telstra not to bother to put in any for it.

City Link managing director Neil de Wit says it now requires access holes to go in when ducts are being laid.

"But because this was the early days of the co-operative arrangement and it was over the Christmas period and the council was comfortable with us doing this work later, we decided to do that."

He says digging the 25 holes will only cause "small amount of disruption."

After the upheavals in the area over recent months, I guess that by comparison, the disruption will be small. But that doesn't make it any more welcome.