Surveillance system installation is underway
Fibre optic cables stretch along the motorways
 Automatic Number Plate Recognition: just the start of the roadside surveillance project |
The Highways Agency is trumpeting how well work is progressing on its £490 million National Roads Telecommunication Service project, whose ostensible aim is to upgrade motorway communications. We benefit via more accurate, real-time information about travel conditions on motorways, reckons the HA. They benefit because they can watch us all, whatever we do and wherever we go.
Phase one of the project, including installing fibre-optic cables alongside motorways to join up the existing telecoms network, is underway on a 25 kilometre stretch of the M62 between J22 and J26; nearly complete on the M4 between J10 and J12, and just starting on the M3 between J2 to J9.
Drivers using these routes will have seen the purple pipes used to protect the fibre optic cables in the verges where work has taken place.
The Highways Agency operates a dedicated telecommunications network that connects thousands of roadside devices to a network of traffic control centres across the country. Made up of fibre optic and copper cables that run along the length of England's motorways, the network links more than 14,000 message signs, emergency telephones, CCTV cameras and traffic monitoring systems to the control centres. The telecoms network will be fully digital by September 2007.
The Minister for Roads, Dr Stephen Ladyman, said: "Significant investment is being made to upgrade the motorway communications infrastructure so drivers can have access to accurate, real time information and use it to plan their journeys more effectively. Together with other initiatives such as the Highways Agency traffic officer service and its national and regional control centres, the Highways Agency is working to make journeys easier on England's motorways."
The fact that fibre optic cable can carry any kind of digital signal, including those from the surveillance cameras which are already springing up at roadsides near you, goes unmentioned in the HA's publicity material.
Remember: you're being watched -- wherever you go.
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