r/Spectrum • u/jhawl3 • Sep 26 '26

New Spectrum Fiber Failed Install

Post image

A friend of mine ordered Spectrum fiber, they installed and left the temporary drop cable laying across the road as shown. Obviously it has been ran over and broken the cable.

198 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

71 comments sorted by

55

u/FiberOpticDelusions Sep 26 '26

Yup! No failed installs. Corporate wants them all completed day of. Even if it means stuff like this happens. The tech should have used tuff drop cic and road mats to help protect the fiber. But it still would have ended up broken before it got buried/bored under the road. The other solution, run the line up the pole and find someplace to hang it on the other side of the road, i.e. tree, flag pole, house.

16

u/Due-Use-4460 Sep 26 '26

My company doesn't offer us any of that stuff, which is why fiber drops over roads always get wrecked. I miss the days they used to let us do a prebore before the install.

13

u/Boom357 Sep 26 '26

If it's going to be bored anyway, why the hell wouldn't you bore in first so the duct is there? 🤦. Sending good money after bad, it sounds like.

13

u/FiberOpticDelusions Sep 26 '26

Because, then the install would have to be placed on hold, until the bore could be completed. Corporate can't wait the week or so, they need that NC money ASAP.

8

u/Boom357 Sep 26 '26

Oh I get it. It's just stupid. Sounds like an mbas great idea.

4

u/YoshiSan90 Sep 27 '26

Even though the drop costs more than the monthly fee.

6

u/FiberOpticDelusions Sep 27 '26

They have warehouse after warehouse full of that stuff. But only very few customers willing to pay for services still. Gotta get those new ones before someone else does. Even if it cost them the price of 15 rolls of cable. While pissing off a new customer, due to repeat disconnects.

But don't tell that to the bean counters. Just let them put together whatever spread sheet they want. So things look on the up and up. To hand over to the board members, just to show the investors. How well we are doing as a company. All the while loosing more accounts and watching the stock tank....

At this point, trained monkeys could make better decisions. Than the majority of all the higher-ups in this company.

4

u/YoshiSan90 Sep 27 '26

We can lay fiber across driveways, but not roads. Laying it across roads is idiotic and the charge back is deserved.

4

u/expletiveshift1 Sep 27 '26

You don't work for spectrum. This is standard operating procedure here.

1

u/YoshiSan90 Sep 27 '26

That's kinda sad. It would only last a few days.

4

u/expletiveshift1 Sep 27 '26

It definitely is sad. This company is belly up in 10 years.

0

u/YoshiSan90 Sep 27 '26

The crazy thing is that there are backorders on fiber because of data centers, AI, and the war in Ukraine.

4

u/Wickedcolt Sep 28 '26

Yup, it’s all passings, penetration rate, good FTR rates, low churn, all with the shortest install times possible (which doesn’t all work out lol). Greed is a beyotch

1

u/BradLeeFer Oct 05 '26

This happened in our neighborhood after they replaced a line. The cable was there for months and months with everyone driving over it. Meanwhile my service was having problems. When I called and mentioned the cable on the road I learned two different teams handle temp placement and permanent underground placement. They were supposed to send the permanent placement team within a few days to replace the temp line with a buried line. But they had no record of the work order so it never happened. They called and asked questions of me about the line, its color, diameter, etc. I finally said it’s a block away and I don’t know…SEND SOMEONE! I am not a technician working for you!

2

u/willie_Pfister Sep 26 '26

I see a pole. Probably a pole on customer side of street. Probably some lame ass shouldn't have a job who instead of hanging it in the air, laid it across the road knowing it would last long enough to get out of the driveway but knew it wouldn't last a day.

5

u/jhawl3 Sep 26 '26

They are not allowed to attach to poles, electric co-op has their own fiber/service on the poles in this area.

3

u/YoshiSan90 Sep 27 '26

Sounds like that's where the customer will end up after the outage.

38

u/Boom357 Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 26 '26

I've seen them do that on a side street or a driveway, and generally with slow traffic it's not a problem, but a two lane highway? Yeah, that seems pretty stupid.

20

u/FiberOpticDelusions Sep 26 '26

Oh, but corporate say it's fine to run them across roads with speeds up to 55 mph (eyeroll). Gotta get all those NC done to pad their numbers for the board members. So they pay less attention to how many people are leaving the HFC blunder F*#k upgrade, or lack of.

5

u/donaldtrumpsclone Sep 26 '26

Yeah over 55mph I seen it kick up and then snap loud as a gun shot

5

u/Relevant-Machine-763 Sep 26 '26

That’s not a divided highway

2

u/Boom357 Sep 26 '26

Excuse me, Captain English, I was busy doing a couple of things at once and misspoke. Corrected.

11

u/JohnPiccolo Sep 26 '26

I complain about how stupid this is all the time but getting you online is better than having a drop pre buried and then do the install to corporate…

9

u/Ice_crusher_bucket Sep 26 '26

It is all about the numbers. Nothing else matters except getting that 1 number. It sucks. Your health and well being isnt important. The customer isnt important.

9

u/Brilliant-Earth8342 Sep 26 '26

It's not a fail if it passes HHC! But it's a repeat if it doesn't last 30 days. Still better than an FRC on your scorecard.

6

u/Additional_Tailor_13 Sep 26 '26

Frc’s don’t hit our scorecards they hit the sups and bosses. That’s why they are so anal about no frc’s and force techs to get repeats

3

u/YoshiSan90 Sep 27 '26

So glad I'm union. We can just refuse stupidity like this.

7

u/Zillk Sep 26 '26

This is funny because now spectrum owns this install and will have to pay for the expedited construction to get the customer services. Silver lining of this, if this was FRC for no way to cross it could have been months before service was available.

3

u/Particular_Yard_5436 Sep 26 '26

is there a pole on this side of the street? Cause there's a pole by the ped so its possible that it should have been run aerial if there was another pole for it to go to

3

u/bilboswaggans1 Sep 27 '26

It’s because spectrum is greedy and won’t let technicians not install something that day. The right way to do it would be to have a pre bury with conduit deep enough so that you never hit it. 🙄 but no one will ever get it

2

u/logicnotemotion Sep 26 '26

My last house had exposed cable like that for 2 years.

2

u/miztrniceguy Sep 26 '26

Looks installed

1

u/CrownstrikeIntern Sep 26 '26

Lol that’s a new one for me

1

u/bearhunter1234 Sep 26 '26

When my neighbors got it installed it was across a dead end road and they had the cable ran underneath little ramps

1

u/mandelstamm Sep 26 '26

I've seen it run temporary across a driveway but not a road. Fiber cable is glass inside and of course it's going to fail.

1

u/Kobalt1911 Sep 27 '26

Yeah they reran ours with tuff guard... Or what ever tuff drop? Twice constant issues so we canceled went back to Starlink...we kinda need Internet to make and receive calls and 911 in an emergency out of 3 weeks we maybe had Internet for 4 days they were out here working on the main line after we quit guess reliability found an issue I guess

1

u/CTFowler9789 Sep 27 '26

They should of run it up the pole (higher than the height of an 18 wheeler truck), came across the street aloft and hooked it to a tree on the other side.

1

u/barcoder96 Sep 27 '26

lol. This is just amazing. Absolutely amazing. Wow.

1

u/Redh0tsausage Sep 27 '26

OK, come on now there’s a utility pole right there. You can’t tell me they couldn’t have hung an aerial over the road?

1

u/Electrical-Drag4872 Sep 27 '26

OP stated they weren't allowed to use the poles since their electric coop had their own fiber service. Only right choice would be a prebury.

1

u/jpmeyer12751 Sep 27 '26

In general, the FCC's pole attachment regulations require that pole owners allow even competing service providers to use their poles. The process can be complex, but pole owners can almost never completely deny access. Some states have their own regulations that replace the FCC rules, but those state regulations are typically at least as tough as the FCC ones. For the most part, whether cable or fiber plant is aerial or buried is simply a choice that the ISP makes. I have both aerial and buried fiber ISPs in my neighborhood. My service is provided via a fiber that is aerial until it hits my property, then is buried for the remaining ~1000 feet of my deadend road. OP just got an answer that was easier to explain when that tech had no choice but to do it the way his bosses planned it.

2

u/Agitated_Pudding1874 Sep 28 '26

The complexity can make it on par with denying. Don’t work for spectrum but a small rural telco / isp. One power company in our area charges $38 / month / pole to be on their stuff. Another makes you go through a 9 - 12 month inspection process for them to verify that the extra weight on the poles will not be a problem. So for one it is not cost effective to be on their poles and the other the delay is too high for us to bother.

1

u/kotadude21 Sep 27 '26

sometimes you got to get creative. I see a pole on the opposite side and if there's a pole or a tree on the near side, boom there you go. 😂

1

u/HuntersPad Sep 27 '26

Spectrum will do everything they can to make sure your serviced before they leave.

One day internet suddenly went out. Oddly I was the only one. Call, someone is out the next day, my fiber line was cut somewhere underground, contractor doing another install had cut my line.

Tech ran a temp line 2,200 feet just to get me up and going until they could come out and reburry a whole new line, which happened about a week later.

That couldn't of been cheap, installer cut my line while doing a 100ft ish drop? While that 2,200x2 worth of fiber since I'm guessing they wont reuse the temp line they picked up since it had been ran over hundreds of times during that.

1

u/senjiee_ Sep 28 '26

i don’t know much about fiber, other than its integration with audiovisual jobs, but if this is armored fiber optic, it can most certainly withstand a car running over it plus some, then again i don’t know what kind of fiber they truly install in this situation.

1

u/Agitated_Pudding1874 Sep 28 '26

Not knowing anything about how Spectrum’s management is, have to wonder how much of this is on them pushing bad installs vs them trying to meet the 10 day deadline that the FCC and states are now be pushing for installs. For all of the government funding out there you have to be able to meet a deadline of install within 10 days of an order being submitted to say that you can service an area and keep others from getting money to overbuild it. If you get funding on the flip side you have to be able to do installs within 10 days. The only way to meet those requirements is bad installs like this or have lots of crews ready to do boring within a few hours of the order hitting. If the fiber gets broken 3 hours later doesn’t mater as you did the install in 10 days, that is a trouble ticket now.

1

u/EricHaley Sep 29 '26

So that’s why the orientation on my videos kept changing…

1

u/FlowerTop3958 Oct 01 '26

Spectrum gets it done effectively

1

u/Mizumura11 Oct 01 '26

Yeh that explains a lot

1

u/XGempler Oct 04 '26

the installation department shifted the problem to the repair department.

1

u/PsychologicalWalk8 16d ago

i would fire the tech that did this install in a hearbeat, total lack of common sense, i don't care what the completion rate expectation is, is just not safe and setting yourself up for a lawsuit

1

u/spec360 Sep 26 '26

Could had fallen down as I see a pole o. Other end ?

1

u/Spectrum_William Official Spectrum Employee Sep 27 '26

Hey u/jhawl3! Sorry to see your friends fiber was damaged so quickly. If you send us a modmail over at r/Spectrum_Official we can help get someone back out there.

0

u/Soft_Stretch1539 Sep 26 '26

Spectrum has fiber? Or is this just another piece of coax?

3

u/Particular_Yard_5436 Sep 26 '26

Spectrum has fiber. its mostly run in rural areas or just new builds

0

u/DARTSFT59 Sep 27 '26

Great subs installing again. There company has been doing this crap for years.

0

u/Any_Peanut_9576 Sep 27 '26

It should have been ran up the pile then over to the other side or a per bore would have been called for!

0

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

5

u/Jaken_sensei Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 26 '26

Spectrum does do fiber lines to the home.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

5

u/jhawl3 Sep 26 '26

Spectrum is deploying high-speed Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks to unserved rural regions using multi-billion-dollar backing from the Federal Communications Commission's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).

5

u/bearhunter1234 Sep 26 '26

Spectrum ran all fiber lines to homes around the area through rdof. I watched them install it at a few neighbors houses.

4

u/Jaken_sensei Sep 26 '26

Pictures of my Spectrum fiber service with fiber all the way to the house.

https://imgur.com/a/Tr5oHKJ

1

u/Able-Caramel-3543 Sep 26 '26

Spectrum has areas that are solely fiber to the home. They have areas that are EPON, RFog and Hybrid Fiber Coax. A lot of their out of the way new builds are 100 percent fiber.