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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

If you have a map of all utility poles you could probably just avoid every straight line between any of them within some reasonable distance of eachother.

it's an approximation of dangerous areas, catenary curves are more accurate than straight lines but you don't know the length of the cable so you don't know the droop height.

OpenPoleMap is achievable. Just don't expect local governments to subsidise the mapping of obstacles to drones of the likes of Amazon.

Most "utility pole maps" only show poles with power lines on them.

A ton of telco cables are on telco-only poles (basically just a really straight tree trunk shoved in the ground, no cross-arms at all).

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.

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.

It doesn’t need to be at the cm level. Giving them a 10m berth should be fine.

A 10m berth from wires would exclude a substantial proportion of houses in my city.

Then they shouldn’t be flying in your city.

As is apparently becoming obvious.

I can’t think of a major city I’ve been to on earth where 10M from a hung cable is realistic outside of some suburbs and rural areas.

    > I can’t think of a major city I’ve been to on earth

Does Manhattan count? I am pretty sure south of 96th street has no above ground utilities.

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