I know of an ~800 foot tower built in the 1930's and still in service.
My previous employer was a tenant there. It has multiple radio stations
and several cell carriers on it. Very busy tower. It's been repainted,
reguyed, and reinforced over the years.
That particular tower will live well past it's hundredth birthday,
though it might be exceptional in that regard.
I bet most of them could live that long if they had a good foundation
and someone had a reason to keep investing in it.
-Adam
On 11/21/2018 12:27 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
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.
Burnt Fiber
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