Telco wants to put 900km of cable in city streets

By BERNARD ORSMAN

TelstraClear has plans to dig up verges in nearly 2700 suburban Auckland City streets to bury a fibre-optic communications cable.

Less than a year after five competing networks retreated from the central business district, the company is seeking permission to bury the cable along 300km of roadside.

The company also plans to string about 600km of heavy black cabling on suburban power poles in the city.

The same move stirred Wellingtonians when Telecom and TelstraClear's predecessor, Saturn, blighted the landscape with up to 10 new cables a pole.

TelstraClear also has plans this year to apply to introduce the new network in Manukau City.

TelstraClear has earmarked $1.2 billion to spend over four years on the first combined network of telephone, internet, cable television and other services to serve 70 per cent of the country, of which $550 million will be spent in Auckland and Manukau.

Company spokesman Quentin Bright said the application process for Auckland was likely to take time and there was no timetable on when work might start.

The Auckland City Council will consider an application from TelstraClear on Friday to lay the cable under suburban road berms, footpaths or roads. The company wants to dig within the road berm.

It plans to do much of the work using trenchless drilling, which has been used effectively by Metrowater to lay water and wastewater pipes with minimum disruption.

Council planners have recommended that the resource consent application should go ahead without the public having the opportunity to comment.

In a report, planner Karen Thomas said the effect on the environment would be "insignificant" and no one would be adversely affected.

The report said digging under road berms could have an effect on precious trees but council arborists had assessed this as minimal.

Mr Bright said the work of several competing telecommunications firms in the central business district could not be compared with what was proposed by one company in suburban Auckland.

He said some disruption to residents was unavoidable but it would be kept it to a minimum.

The council report estimated that the work would generally be limited to one day outside any house.

Mr Bright said TelstraClear acknowledged that when it came to applying for resource consent to string its cable along power poles the public would have the chance to comment.

Under the council's district plan, hanging new telecommunications or power cables above ground is not a "permitted activity".

TelstraClear has made the first application on the basis that the network will be installed overhead where the network of the electricity lines company Vector is overhead and underground where Vector's network is underground, but it has the option to construct the entire network underground.

About two-thirds of the Vector network in Auckland City is overhead and a third underground.

Mr Bright said the company would look to work in with Vector, which is reviving a programme this year to bury up to 40km of residential overhead power lines a year.