It's really expensive, time consuming, and those wires are still susceptible to backhoes.

I think the joke goes:

What three things would you bring with you if you were stuck on a deserted island?

A length of fiber, a shovel, and a margarita.

Bury the fiber and drink the margarita while briefly waiting for a backhoe to come dig up the fiber.

It's not just the upfront cost either, but once you bury the cables all future cable upgrades and replacements will be more expensive too.

Burying cables nevertheless makes sense in some places, particularly dense areas. For areas with low population density (most of the land mass of the US for instance) it's totally cost prohibitive.

Backhoes cause damage in a small area, and generally it should be possible to notify the cable owner and for them to get a repair crew dispatched quickly.

A big storm can take out overhead cables in hundreds of places in a short time. It can take a day or more to even find all the damage, and you can have a lot more places that need repair than you have repair crews, so it can take days for some places to even get a repair crew on site.

Also, a storm that takes out overhead fiber or other telecom cables often also takes out power. I believe that in many areas the services that own non-power cables that share poles with power cables are not allows to touch anything on the pole until the power company restores power. That can further slow down scheduling telecom repairs.

You need to make sure backhoes know where the cables are. It works very well in Netherland. Except for high voltage long distance power, everything goes underground.

Although in urban areas, I'd expect it to make more sense to have spacious tubes underground through which all the cables are easily pulled, so you don't have to dig everything up all the time. Maybe they already do that; I'm not sure.

Does the Netherlands have a system for mandatory conduit sharing?

I honestly have no idea. We might. There's very likely to be tons of regulation around it to make everything as safe and practical as possible for everybody.

You must already have conduit underground. You aren’t running water and sewerage on elevated lines are you, unless you’re very rural.

you are a moron if you are digging and haven't got the proper permits and surveys done. yes... accidents do happen but can mostly be avoided. but, i guarantee that someone digging up a line with a backhoe happens ALOT less frequent then some idiot in a car taking out a phone-pole.

>i guarantee that someone digging up a line with a backhoe happens ALOT less frequent then some idiot in a car taking out a phone-pole.

yeah, but can you guarantee that the repair costs total of the more frequently repaired option is greater than the repair costs total of the less frequently repaired option?

repair frequency is only a single metric -- what if the frequency was low but the cost to repair was 20x?

Florida prefers to upgrade the poles to ones that hurricanes can't bother. Concrete is popular, with some poles being 2 feet thick. Ductile iron is becoming popular.

Buried stuff is hard to fix and is at risk of flooding.

High voltage cables still make more sense overground, because of higher costs and because they hardly fail.

But they can ruin the beauty of our natural landscapes.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/15/national-gri...

You need to keep the soil on top of underground cables free from trees and deep-rooting bushes, so it’s not necessarily better looking.

I know distribution lines are routinely buried, but can transmission lines be buried?

It doesn’t work too well unless you’re doing HVDC.

But when they do, it's usually because of storms, trees, and...squirrels.

Until they do and burn down towns in Northern California...

there are tradeoffs. digging holes and trenches is expensive.

See the part about gophers