Why Thailand Has So Many Overhead Wires
The oddly fascinating story behind Thailand's tangled power lines.
Updated 2026-08-04
The tangled overhead wires you see everywhere in Thailand are mostly telecom and internet cables piled onto electricity poles, not just power lines. They built up over decades of fast, largely unplanned urban growth, when it was quicker and far cheaper to string new cables overhead than to bury them. Burying cables can cost many times more, and Thailand's heavy monsoon rains, flooding and high humidity make underground networks harder to install and maintain — so the famous 'cable spaghetti' stayed. Cities like Bangkok are now slowly moving some lines underground.
The wires are one of the first things tourists notice
Step onto almost any street in Bangkok and one sight stands out: great knotted bundles of black cable looping between the poles overhead, sometimes sagging low enough to touch. It looks chaotic next to Thailand's malls and skytrain, and the tangles have earned a nickname — 'cable spaghetti'. Many people assume it is all high-voltage power and worry it must be dangerous, but the reality is more mundane.
Cable spaghetti as an accidental sight
Most of what you see is not the electricity supply at all. The bulk of those overhead bundles are telecom and internet cables — many of them old, disused lines that were simply left in place when new ones were added. The actual power cables usually sit on the upper part of the pole, spaced and insulated, while the messy lower tangle is communications wiring. That is why the poles look far more alarming than they are.
Why Thailand's streets are wrapped in wire
The short answer is speed and cost. Thailand urbanised rapidly, and demand for electricity and, later, telephone and internet connections grew faster than tidy infrastructure could keep up. Each time a new provider or customer needed a line, the quickest fix was to hang another cable on the existing poles. The state utility, EGAT, and its distribution partners run the power grid, but the many competing telecom companies each added their own cables over the years, and old ones were rarely removed — so the bundles just grew.
- Fast, unplanned growth meant infrastructure was added reactively rather than designed in advance.
- Overhead installation is quick and cheap compared with digging up roads.
- Multiple telecom operators each strung their own cables onto shared poles.
- Disused cables were often abandoned in place instead of being taken down.
The economics and the climate
Burying cables would look neater, but it is expensive — often many times the cost of overhead lines — and slow, because it means excavating busy streets. Thailand's tropical climate makes it harder still: the annual monsoon, frequent flooding and humidity of 70–90% all raise the risk and cost of underground networks, which must be sealed against water. Given those realities, keeping cables in the air has long been the practical choice.
Sources: Tourism Authority of Thailand (tourismthailand.org); Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (egat.co.th) and Metropolitan Electricity Authority (mea.or.th).