Fibre 250Meters from home

[pinball wizard]

Oh and also, you won't get wayleaves to work in the street, only on the road reserve or pavement.

 

[Scary_Turtle]

Yip its a lot cheaper to have people dig. Directional drilling is only really used to drill under rivers or major intersections and still if you hit a rock outcrop you have to pull back and try again.

When I was working for DFA we had one drill that took almost a year to complete and cost around 4 million Rand because of the amount of rock in the area. I think it was 150m drill.

On the Wayleave side of things when you apply you can work on either side of the road as long as you are 1m down and 300mm away from other services (unless there is gas, major water cables, major electric cables etc). There is a plan drawn up before hand but things can be changed pretty easily if you want to cross the road 50m earlier.

JRA is pretty slack and a brown envelope can get anything moving in the right direction.

 

[Ho3n3r]

We have fibre in our area literally 30 metres away, in the complex next door - when I walk outside, I look straight into the complex that has it. But not at ours yet. We are the complex on the corner.

 

[Deleted member 369928]

i am still unconvinced. It takes us 12 000 + years to learn how to efficiently drill through a rock?

 

[Toxxyc]

i am still unconvinced. It takes us 12 000 + years to learn how to efficiently drill through a rock?

Next time you see someone with a directional drilling machine next to the side of the road, pull over, get out and take a look at what they actually do. It's not as simple as a massive engine with a drill bit. In essence the machine "hammers" the bit into the ground, it doesn't drill like a conventional drill. Adding to that the fact that the tip of that bit can be pointed and directed, you end up with a very specialized piece of equipment.

PS: And when we talk about drilling through rock we're not talking a few pebbles, we're talking about solid banks of stone. I've seen it and have been involved in some blasting on site like those. Nothing but explosives will break that stuff up.

 

[blowdart18]

The biggest problem is not the drilling, or the trenching. The guys who are trenching can complete a section in a week or two.

It all comes down to the municipality, and the permissions needed to do certain things before you can even put a shovel in the ground.

We needed a building plan to dig into the paving outside our business, from the DFA fibre to the business is probably 3 meters. This permission took the ISP and DFA almost 4 months to complete. The actual trenching took 2 days, and another day to blow the fibre.

Look at the planning scheme and permissions for Tshwane: http://www.tshwane.gov.za/sites/Departments/City-Planning-and-Development/Land%20Use%20Applications%20Manuals%20March%202015/PermissionTTPS.pdf

 

[Toxxyc]

The biggest problem is not the drilling, or the trenching. The guys who are trenching can complete a section in a week or two.

It all comes down to the municipality, and the permissions needed to do certain things before you can even put a shovel in the ground.

We needed a building plan to dig into the paving outside our business, from the DFA fibre to the business is probably 3 meters. This permission took the ISP and DFA almost 4 months to complete. The actual trenching took 2 days, and another day to blow the fibre.

Look at the planning scheme and permissions for Tshwane: http://www.tshwane.gov.za/sites/Departments/City-Planning-and-Development/Land%20Use%20Applications%20Manuals%20March%202015/PermissionTTPS.pdf

If it took 4 months then someone didn't know what they were doing. Emergency wayleaves for such short distances are granted very quickly (I've seen such builds come in and be completed in under a week). Specifically DFA allows for trenching of 5m or less to be done "on risk", so to speak, with no wayleaves if it's straight to a building and there are no visible services.

 

[blowdart18]

You probably right, all I know is that Tshwane at the time was super stubborn, and kept digging in their heels.

 

[Scary_Turtle]

i am still unconvinced. It takes us 12 000 + years to learn how to efficiently drill through a rock?

Think of it like drilling into a wall with a hand held drill. You feel something hard so you push, the drill dips down to the path of least resistance and leaves a giant hole in the wall.

That's the same thing with a directional drill the head hits rock and instead of drilling through it, it follows the sand. This can lead the drill to straighten or bend upwards which snaps the pole and you lose a very expensive drill bit. You are also looking at thousands of Rands of petrol for the water pump + drill and if there is no water you need 2 trucks shipping water to and from the drill site.

In Pretoria you almost cant drill because of Dolomite and JHB is literally build on rock.

So 25 guys digging at minimum wage (not sure what it is now but was around R100 when I was working) = R2500 a day and the cost of running a driver plus bakkie. There is a 90% chance a service has already run along any road so the soil is soft, these guys can do between 500m and 1km a day.

or

One day of drilling which may or may not work at around R5000 - R10 000 a day (water, fuel, wages etc) for 100m.

 

[Napalm2880]

So 25 guys digging at minimum wage (not sure what it is now but was around R100 when I was working) = R2500 a day and the cost of running a driver plus bakkie. There is a 90% chance a service has already run along any road so the soil is soft, these guys can do between 500m and 1km a day.

Can confirm. Metrofibre (or at least the company they contracted) had at least 50 guys dig 1km down my street in a single day. Quite amazing.

 

[pinball wizard]

We have fibre in our area literally 30 metres away, in the complex next door - when I walk outside, I look straight into the complex that has it. But not at ours yet. We are the complex on the corner.

I've sent you a whatsapp. Maybe we can help, depending on whether you are on net or not.

 

[Orihalcon]

Yea...same boat I'll be in when we move now. Fibre roll out stops at the house right next door...Right. Next. Door. All because our house falls under a different distribution box. Bloody hell that is frustrating.

Campaigning to get VUMA in there to lay down fibre now.

 

[Deleted member 369928]

So 25 guys digging at minimum wage (not sure what it is now but was around R100 when I was working) = R2500 a day and the cost of running a driver plus bakkie. There is a 90% chance a service has already run along any road so the soil is soft, these guys can do between 500m and 1km a day.

or

One day of drilling which may or may not work at around R5000 - R10 000 a day (water, fuel, wages etc) for 100m.

ok cool. So cost is then a concern. And we have 14 million people without jobs.
50 people can dig 1km a day and repair the driveways they messed up, and lets not even talking about the water pipes they broke and electrical grids they cut off by accident and having to re tar roads etc.

Which means technically in one day 280 000 kilometers can be dug out. So they can dig from my house in pretoria to capetown 200 times.

And yet. It takes years to get one area rolled out.
And the reason is paperwork that has be approved?

I guess its not unreasonable. Considering the goverment managed to crash 2 trains into each other this week.

 

[Jimmy-Z]

Same boat as the OP, the fibre installation currently in progress ends 1 block from where I live. If the distribution boxes are going to get upgraded then hopefully that sorts out the problems I've been having since the middle of last year. As it is, my ADSL line is practically dead between 8 & 10pm, I'm manually setting the line adjustment on my router to get between 5 & 6mb during the day & between 3 & 4mb at night, with crc errors in the 1000's per hour sometimes.

 

[KOPITE]

Can they not run fibre straight from the Exchange/MSAN to your house. I'm about 700m from the exchange and i have 40mb/s vdsl.