 and trained a new generation of civil engineers who carried on his good work after his death on the 15 March 1891. Some general points. This was a massive undertaking but resulted in an infrastructure that has remained ser- viceable for 150 years. This was only possible because it was massively overdimensioned and paid for from government funds. A 50-year return might be considered acceptable to a pension fund, a 150-year return might be considered over long but the longer the infras- tructure lasts the greater the social and economic return. There are still Roman aqueducts in use today. This is a two-way delivery system and therefore conceptually similar to telecommunications. The 360 000 miles of sewer in the UK have become host to fibre systems over the past ten years but not all of the private sector initiatives have gone according to plan either in the UK or Australia, where as at 2011 legal disputes are in process. This is almost inevitable considering the short-term investment horizon that the private sector has to work to or chooses to work to and the implicit long-term return of this sort of investment including a social return, in this case health, that cannot be reflected in a profit and loss account or corporate balance sheet. This is a continuation of a conundrum that goes back at least to Plato and probably much further where public good and private ambition become hard to reconcile. So what does this have to do with telegraph poles? 2 http://www.romanaqueducts.info/q&a/11stillinuse.htm 3 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7104011.stm. Cable Network and Fibre Network Technologies and Topologies Above the Streets of London - The Telegraph In 1837 the British physicists, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph using the principle of electromagnetism to send and detect electrical pulses along a copper cable. The first public telegraph service in the world began in 1839, with two Cooke and Wheatstone machines either end of a 13-mile stretch of cable running 1