In Ireland there is still plenty of overhead distribution in suburban areas that would date from the 1920's - early 1950's. Any suburbs / housing developments built after the early 1950s have underground cabling for power, phones and often cable television. The vast majority of our "closer" and nicer suburbs date from the 1920's and 30s though.

Typically you'd have 400V (380V) distribution on twisted or individual cables with a twisted pair going to each home usually to the highest point on the house i.e. the chimney top. Phone service runs in a similar configuration and cable television typically ran house-to-house at roof level.

The only thing that does make it different from most of Europe is that our suburbs are very "leafy" and tend to have large front gardens and lots of tree lined streets so most of the power lines and poles disappear, you don't really notice them. Many areas also had the services run behind the houses in lanes so there are no overhead lines on the streets.

The ESB uses a LOT of wood, all distribution lines are on wooden poles, even new installations. Much of the 110KV parts of the transmission network, including new parts are on very high wooden poles with modern pylon style insulators on the top. They're considered to look better and have less impact on the scenery than metal pylons. 220KV and 400KV lines are all on metal pylons.

Rural distribution is all on 10/20KV lines with pole mounted transformers feeding houses/farms individually. All wooden poles, very "US style".

The Cable TV networks are a little off topic but they deserve a mention.

They're generally much older than anything i've seen elsewhere. Cable hit surburban Dublin and Cork in the late 1960s and there were even small cable systems in the 1950s relaying BBC from large communal antennas that picked up broadcasts from the UK and fed them by cable when RTE was either non-exsistant or very very boring ! [Linked Image] Many people in Dublin particuarly still call cable tv "Piped Television" or even "the relays".

When it was installed initially they just ran thick co-ax from a "head end" house to house under the facia boards just below roof level. The cable company would often give someone free cable if they'd agree to have a small amplifier fitted to boost the signal en-route. Those systems initially carried 2 Irish channels and 2/3 british channels and expanded as satellite became available and more channels went on air in the UK and IRL some even carried their own local programming. None of the channels were encrypted in Dublin and Cork adopted a US type set-top-box with analogue encryption. These boxes even came with wood paneling to match the TV sets of their era.

They've been re-wired with better co-ax to give more capacity in the 1980s and during the 1990s and 2000s they've been gradually converted to digital systems and fiber's been layed underground along streets, however the coax house-to-house network still carries all of the basic 18 to 30 channels that are available free to air and usually unencrypted, you just plug the cable into the TV (VHF band I/II/III and UHF)