Beacons with red and white stripes block the sidewalk in front of Bärbel Horn’s house in Friedrichshain. “Will they stay forever now? For at least three years they have been restricting the space there considerably, ”wrote the reader in a letter to the editors. And asked: “Please find those responsible and make sure that we have space again on the sidewalk.”
What’s going on there? I asked myself and made my way to Lichtenberger Strasse, just around the corner from Strausberger Platz. The beacons were clearly visible there, and I looked curiously into the cordoned-off square. A manhole cover, some leaves – something is wrong, I concluded.
Only a few meters further on I came across a second such barrier arrangement on the median of Singerstrasse. It didn’t look like it had just been installed yesterday, either. The request to the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district office brought me in the right direction. It was a Telekom matter, I was told.
At Telekom, in turn, I was given this information: It is a cable duct that is ready for renovation. Press spokesman Adrian Sanchez explained to me that with a total of around 200,000 cable ducts for Deutsche Telekom in the entire Berlin urban area, there is always a lot to do. “The shafts are used to accommodate connections and branches of cables in our networks, such as fiber optic cables for digital data transmission in the landline Internet. The cables run from Telekom operating points via these shafts and via network distributors – often recognizable as gray boxes – along streets and sidewalks in the direction of the customer – sometimes over longer distances. “
Adrian Sanchez couldn’t really hope for a quick renovation. “Also because of the limited civil engineering capacities, these cable ducts are being gradually refurbished or dismantled as part of a comprehensive processing plan over a period of more than two years.” A refurbishment order has already been placed for the blocked shaft on the traffic island at the corner of Lichtenberger Straße and Singerstraße. The next steps for the closed shaft at the corner of Lichtenberger Strasse and Neue Blumenstrasse are currently being examined. This test is expected to be completed within the next few weeks. Oh well.
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