[Tagging] Telephone poles and lines?

[Joseph Eisenberg]

Nita Rae,

Do you know of any utility poles, telephone poles or other poles
carrying communications cables that have been mapped in your area? How
have they been tagged?

Do you have a preference for how to map poles that don't carry any
power wires or cables?

On 5/27/19, Nita Rae Sanders <cosmicrae at gmail.com> wrote:
> My own take is that it is a 'mixed use utility pole' without regard to
> which utilities are using it. You could potentially then apply tags to
> designate which utilities are actually present. Very large poles (e.g.
> 230KV and up) would typically not have other utilities on them, but there
> may be corner cases that test the credulity of that statement.
>
> On Sun, May 26, 2019 at 6:50 PM Warin <61sundowner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Around me, the 'poles' carry;
>>
>> power,
>>
>> cable internet,
>>
>> cable TV (some times the cable carries both TV and internet combined) and
>>
>> telephone.
>>
>> The don't usually have poles for each service.
>>
>> The provision of a national internet service that provides a combined
>> telephone service means that the telephone cable will be no more.
>> There is also a reduction of 'landline' telephone as many have dropped
>> that service as they now all have cell phones.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 26/05/19 21:32, Joseph Eisenberg wrote:
>> > I recently checked the wiki and taginfo, and was surprised that there
>> > does not seem to be a preferred way to tag telephone poles, in
>> > contrast to power poles and lampposts.
>> >
>> > Options in use are:
>> > 1) man_made=utility_pole - used 4 930, has a short wiki description:
>> > "A single pole supporting elevation of any of various and unspecified
>> > public utilities, such as power transmission, lighting or telephony"
>> > - so this can also include power poles or poles used for multiple
>> > types of utilities or lamp posts which also support wires.
>> >
>> > 2) communication=pole - used 3316 times, no wiki page
>> > https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/communication=pole
>> >
>> > 3) man_made=pole - used 2251 times, no wiki page
>> >
>> > 4) telephone=pole - used 1108 times, no wiki page
>> > https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/?key=telephone&value=pole
>> >
>> > User "Chippy" made a wiki page that documents the various tags in use
>> > for telecom lines, poles and cabinets, back in 2015, but none of the
>> > various tags seem to be approved or clearly de facto in use by
>> > mappers:
>> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Telecoms#Telephone_Poles
>> >
>> > There is also not much tagging of telephone cables (or wires?), but
>> > there is a documented tag, communication=line - with a wiki page but
>> > no proposal, used 2550 times. This says "Only the main connections,
>> > mostly sea cables, should be mapped."
>> > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:communication%3Dline
>> >
>> > Perhaps there is a need for a proposal to map minor communication
>> > cables, eg. communication=minor_line?
>> >
>> > Is there a need to map smaller telephone or utility poles?
>> >
>> > I don't have any personal interest in mapping this right now (I'm
>> > still working on rivers, villages and highways in my area!) but it
>> > seems similar to "power=minor_line" and "power=pole" in significance,
>> > and I suppose it's better to develop a good tagging system now.
>> >
>> > While using the key "man_made" would be easiest, perhaps the
>> > communication key is a good idea, parallel to "power"?
>> >
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>>
>>
>>
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