Wire web coming to a view near you

By BERNARD ORSMAN

Draw the curtains and look outside. The view will have changed if TelstraClear's plan is approved.

For starters, if you are a TelstraClear customer, there will be a new cable coming into your home from a street pole.

Look a bit further and there will be bundles of one, two, three and four cables, varying in thickness from the diameter of a 10c coin to that of the inside of a toilet paper roll, hanging on the power poles.

The cables will be hanging a minimum of 30cm below existing power lines and a minimum of 4.25m above ground. Houses on gentle slopes that look straight through the cable will be the worst affected.

Blame the computer age and fierce competition in telecommunications. Or more precisely, the telecommunications giant TelstraClear, which, for reasons of cost, is seeking to hang much of its fibre-optic network on power poles in Auckland and Manukau cities.

The $1.2 billion nationwide cable TV and telecommunications network starts with a main fibre-optic cable running into Auckland along the Southern Motorway to a Penrose communications centre housing a telephone exchange, a cable TV unit and radio antenna masts.

From there, the network will fan out to five or six high-speed fibre-optic rings looping back into the main cable. Each ring will feed up to 50 "node" cabinets, which will in turn each feed up to 500 potential customers.

Each node consists of two dark green streetside cabinets where the fibre-optic telephone cable signal is converted to copper cable for distribution and cable TV is converted from a fibre-optic cable signal to a radio frequency.

From the cabinets, bundles of four cables will roll out, decreasing as they go to three, two and one cable bundles.

At every pole there will be black cylindrical customer connection points, measuring 30cm by 10cm, for telephone services at about the same height as the cable. There will also be silver stainless steel units to connect customers to cable television services suspended from the network about 0.5m from every second pole.

Overhead amplifiers, 20cm by 20cm, will also be suspended from poles at 700m intervals with a bigger grey power box attached to the nearest pole.