I was able to pull a great map of the residence off of the French site: http://www.cadastre.gouv.fr this morning. It's a government site where you can put in your address and they give you a map of your area with the official information about the lots in the area. After printing a copy, I went out early this morning looking for manholes to mark.I noted them all down on paper and then updated the digital map with all the box locations using Skitch. The blue circles on the map are original boxes and the red diamonds are the same boxes but with a France Telecom cover. Finally there were a few other boxes and I didn't know what exactly they were so I marked them with triangles. I may have missed a few boxes because I didn't want to go snooping in people's yards but I'll try to fill them in tomorrow.
Most of the boxes are really old and are made of concrete. I assume they were put in when the homes were initially built. Today an older resident told me the homes were first sold in 1971 so Zed's comment about the ducts belonging to the residence are probably correct. However, some of the boxes have fallen apart over time and they've been replaced with new France Telecom boxes. One of my friends in the neighborhood had France Telecom replace their box in the driveway this past year. I'll try and talk to him tomorrow to see how that worked and why France Telecom put in their own branded box.
I ran into a couple of residents while I was looking for the boxes and they all seem pretty excited about the prospect of better connections via fiber. I'm going to send off my application for the company (SARL) to my friend who is a lawyer tomorrow to have him look over before submitting the application next week. That will then allow me to contact the operators directly.
4 comments:
Usually, concrete covers are France Telecom's.
Be carefull with the "generic telecom boxes", because manholes are also used for power (EDF) or public light wiring (probably owned by you residence), and other stuff.
Vincent,
Thank you for the comment and the warning about the potential for power cables to be in there. We'll watch out for it.
Everything I saw in there was marked with telecom stamps except for the remains of the old coax used for the common antenna.
I should have been clearer with the description of the generic boxes as well. They are all the same boxes that are found in the driveways of most homes (I'm uploading pictures to flikr now). Some of them have the original concrete top with no markings while others have been upgraded with metal France Telecom tops. That's the only difference. I think the concrete tops were falling apart the France Telecom simply replaced them.
There are some other boxes in the street that I marked on my map but are probably for electricity, etc. We'll stay clear of those while also looking out for unknown wires in the driveway boxes.
Thanks for the tips :)
One more thing. :)
My neighbor has a copy of a schematic for all the networks running through the residence. The problem is we have no idea what the things mean. I'll try and put up a copy and ask if anyone can decipher what are the different networks. I don't know if dash-dot-dot, dash-dot-dot means the same thing universally or not.
Tad,
You've got my e mail. If you send it to me, I can try to sort it out, even if old maps can have their own code.
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