BIRKENHEAD TELEPHONES

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 984, 29 May 1930, Page 9

BIRKENHEAD TELEPHONES

NEW CABLES BEING LAID ACROSS HARBOUR START MADE TODAY Early this morning a start was made to lay the underwater cable which will connect the NorthcoteBirkenhead telephone service with the city. The Xorthcote-Birkenhead area is at present a toll exchange, but the new cable will link it up with the automatic telephones of Auckland through the Ponsonby exchange. From 7 o’clock this morning, workmen and engineers fi-om the Post and Telegraph Department were at work in the tiny tree-fringed bay at- the foot cf Curran Street, Ponsonby. Two punts v,ere anchored some distance from the shore and carried the cable. from which it will be dropped as the punts are towed across the harbour. They will be left on a sandbank when the tide recedes today. Tomorrow the work of laying tlie cable will be continued across the harbour to Little Shoal Bay, near the Northaote gasworks, where it will be joined with the existing cable linking Kortheote and Birkenhead. TWO CABLES

There are two cables weighing altoi gether 140 tons. In each cable there are 150 wires. When the automatic conection is complete there will be sufficient wires to provide for ail the subscribers for many years to come. The city ends of the cables were laid this morning and buried in the shore at the foot of Curran Street. Joining them with the existing city cables will not be difficult work. Within a very short time now sijbscribers in the Mortheote and Birkenhead districts will be part of the city as far as telephone service is concerned. This improvement tva.s promised by the Hon. J. B. Donald when he was previously Postmaster-General. ) Since then the cable lias been specially I ordered from abroad and arrived in I Auckland last week. No time has been i lost in putting it into position. ! The bay in which the cable is joined j to the city might well be called "cable” \ bay. When the present ones have been 1 finally placed in position ten cables I will have been laid there—two Pacific cables (one to Sydney and the other to Suva), four old telegraph cables which have been there for 30 years, and two telephone cables joining the Far North with Auckland.