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It's more common than you think, a lot of long distance links between cities are a varied combination of aerial, direct buried trenched armored fiber, underground fiber in ducts.

There are also a lot of long-distance links carrying DWDM traffic that are >95% aerial, not on poles that can get hit by trucks, with singlemode fiber inside high voltage AC transmission lines (https://3ee2108sdg.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/cropped-20140...).

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Yeah I understand aerial lines carried by those large towers shown in that image, but utility poles that can get hit by trucks seems problematic. Partly for accidental incidents like a truck crash, but also partly because of how easily it can become an attack vector.

I guess the plus side is that utility pole lines are probably the easiest to fix when cut.

Aerial fiber (ADSS or lashed to strand) is like 1/15th of the cost to build per km compared to underground, 40 inch buried trenched.

A lot of the fiber built during the dotcom 1.0 boom with VC money was trenched along railways or pipeline right of ways.

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