Towers don’t last 100 years either. I’ve seen commercial towers taken down because they’ve reached their design life of 25 years or so, especially guyed towers.
Private tower owners also sometimes have inflated ideas of how much their tower is worth. Within the past week, someone in a totally different state contacted us via Facebook about how much they should charge to lease space on a 120 ft tower on their property. I sent what I thought would be helpful information (including a link to Steel in the Air), but I’m not sure it was appreciated. Here’s part of the response: “If you charge customers as much as most internet carriers do these days lease space is valuable. As someone once explained, if you have an underground oil pump on your property and someone wants to only offer you a few bucks to have access to all the oil being pumped and then turn around and make all the money off the oil, the person allowing that person to sell all that oil is being taken advantage of and should be wiser”. Like the tower owner should get half the revenue or something. And that someone would pay big bucks in rent when they could build their own (probably better) tower for a year in rent payments, and then own the tower for the rest of its useful life. But people ask for free advice, and then disregard it when it doesn’t match their preconceived idea. Like the rent could vary from zero to $1000/mo depending on location and whether you meet all the requirements to lease to a cellco, which you probably don’t, and that a WISP might possibly pay you around $100/mo or the equivalent in free Internet. Nope, nope, you guys are making tons of money and I want my cut. From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Adam Moffett Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2018 10:21 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Melted fiber That's true. Material cost for the repair was maybe $500. But people were there splicing for several hours. You also have to have a whole yard full of crap to be prepared for this. The repair crew (a contractor) had three trucks and a reel trailer and of course all the special fiber tools in addition to regular hand tools. The repair itself is not capital heavy, but having all the stuff to do the repair IS capital heavy. Honestly the worst thing about fiber is getting permission. Army Corps of Engineers, State DOT, State Public Service Commission, County Highway, State DEC, Local Highway Dept, landowners, railroads, incumbent utilities. Permits, easements, pole attachment licenses. You need the official blessing from a zillion people. I really think that's the hardest part. When it's time to actually put up cable that just takes a couple of phone calls and a checkbook. What I keep saying is that it doesn't matter how hard it is up front because you'll get paid for that fiber for a hundred years. I can't say that about any piece of wireless equipment, except maybe the tower itself. -Adam On 11/21/2018 9:42 AM, Trey Scarborough wrote: Same thing happens with wireless when lightning strikes a tower, but in this case the fix is more a cost in time than money of broken equipment... We had a similar problem the other day lighting hit near a customer and melted the fiber in the duct through the shielding after it burned the ground wire out of the building it burned all the way out to the HH and melted a splice case as well. was lucky to find 6 strands out of a 144 that were still working. On 11/20/2018 3:24 PM, Kurt Fankhauser wrote: Things like this make me happy that I'm doing wireless and not fiber! On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 8:02 PM <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Yep, I had the same thing happen. Tree actually broke the primary. Primary fell onto the messenger. Burned the lashing wire in two. Cooked everything real good, but some of the fibers were still working. From: Adam Moffett Sent: Monday, November 19, 2018 4:42 PM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [AFMUG] Melted fiber Thought I'd share. Apparently a pine tree in the ROW grew into the primaries. Either the tree caught fire or it was arcing on the comms, I'm not really sure. I know it's blurry, but all the plastic is melted off. All that's left is the central strength member, lashing wire, and bare fiber. This is activeE, so separate strands for each house. All of them were working. We only found out about it when the Power co's tree trimmers removed the tree and one fiber customer went down. The person who took this picture touched the cable during inspection and 4 more went down. Not sure what was holding them there, but apparently it's been in this condition for a number of weeks. Repair is underway. _____ -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
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