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londons_exploreyesterday at 11:09 PM3 repliesview on HN

Cables don't move often. Why not simply have a map of all of them?

Google sell maps of things like this from street view data.


Replies

octoberfranklintoday at 12:58 AM

Any one particular cable might not move often, but if a telco owns N bucket trucks it's a safe bet that about N cables move every workday.

Telcos are notoriously secretive about the location of their fiber. They even got most state legislatures to exempt it from state-level FOIA laws.

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riotnrrdyesterday at 11:15 PM

All cables? Everywhere in the entire country? Accurate to the centimeter level and updated on the hour?

Edit: This was flippant, but the real issues are: any map you get will be incomplete and obsolete almost immediately and cables move and sway in the breeze.

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HenrikByesterday at 11:46 PM

OpenStreetMap supports annotating poles and theirs cables. It's common for power lines (local and long distance). There are also annotations for communication lines (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:communication%3Dline).

There are also public and proprietary "aviation obstacle" databases across the world.