Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"
Could be worse.
In France the government incentivised the roll out of fibre by divvying up the country into municipal parcels and giving a time-limited monopoly to one of the big ISPs in return for connecting everyone.
In my town SFR got the gig. They sub-contract the work to monkeys whose only priority is to get the job done as quickly as possible. They do this by illegally strewing cables along and between buildings. No trunking, no ducts required.
I watched in horror when this started to happen to my neighbours. Then it came to me. One day I noticed the appearance of a cable strung across the road from the upper storey of the house opposite and attached to my own wall. (This is an old town centre where the buildings face directly on to the roads, no gardens or yards out front.) To make matters worse, it wasn't even to for me! The cable was draped along the wall to my next door neighbour. I complained to the town hall. I got sympathy, but not much more. They forwarded my complaint to SFR who replied stating that they were authorised to commit this vandalism where it was replacing old copper wires similarly strung out in the open. That's actually pretty common in France, but wasn't the case in my street. All the old phone wired were underground.
A few months later a second cable appeared next to that first one. It then bounces back diagonally across the road to connect a house on the other side. The street was rapidly becoming a complete mess.
Then one day I heard the tell-tale clank of a manhole cover being lifted and spotted that the monkeys were back. I observed out of the bedroom window, and, once it became clear that they were about to hitch a third cable to my frontage, I ran down the stairs and out the front door to remonstrate. Already too late, the deed was done during those seconds. No wonder it was such a mess.
At this moment the count is up to four. None of them is for me.
All four, plus a few others, come up out of the pavement on the other side of the road and are dangled off a hook that happened to be embedded under the eaves. There's no trunking or protection of any kind. They are not even clipped to the wall.
This atrocious shoddiness seems to be particular to SFR. If you're in France and not yet fibred, be very afraid.
-A.