Work on moving Bangkok’s communications lines underground to begin next month

Trairat Wiriyasirikul, acting secretary-general of the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission, said the NBTC regards moving the overhead cables on Bangkok roads as a priority.

The operation will start in February in cooperation with the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration and the Metropolitan Electricity Authority.
Communication lines with a combined length of about 400 kilometres hanging on power poles above Bangkok’s roads will be moved underground, Trairat said.
The scenes of entangled communication lines in Bangkok often made negative headlines when foreign celebrities took their pictures and shared them on social media, prompting the Thai government to promise to tackle the problem.
In October, Hollywood actor Russel Crowe who was in Thailand to film a movie, took a picture of Bangkok’s communication cables and posted it on his Twitter page with the caption: “Bangkok dreaming …”.
In 2016, Microsoft co-founder-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates posted a photo and commented about the tangled cables on his Facebook page but he later deleted the post apparently because he had inaccurately identified the communication lines as power cables.

Trairat said that after completing the operation in Bangkok, the NBTC would get down to moving communication cables totalling some 2,000 kilometres in the provinces underground. The NBTC will work with the Provincial Electricity Authority to handle the cables in the provinces.
He said the whle project could take three years.
Once all the communication lines go underground, the country would look tidy in line with the policy of Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha, Trairat added.
He said the NBTC had resolved at its meeting on January 21 to provide financial support for the operation, following up on a Cabinet resolution on November 23 to tackle the tangled overhead communication lines.