If you subscribe to cable TV/Internet services from a company and they need to wire up to your house from the pole, is it usual that they would just lay the cable on the ground across your backyard and across your sidewalk and leave it like that? Thanks.
They will do that as a temporary measure to get your service going. They should have explained that a subcontractor would be by in the next week or 2 to bury that cable. But yes, that’s a thing they do all the time. Ask me about the cable hub in my backyards easement…
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Yep.
The team that buries it is a different union. They’ll be out sometime in the next week to stick it just under the thatch…
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Jinx 
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LOL.
Adding: and we’ve had them across our alley for weeks, getting driven over by dozens of cars. I kind of felt bad, but there really was no avoiding it…
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If they don’t bury it soon, call them back. They did that with me the first time I got cable. I think I ran it over with the lawn mower a couple times. After that they came out & buried it. If you want to be an ass about it, tell them they need to go by your fence line because your getting some work done. Friend of mine did that, they ran it as the crow flies. He was getting work done & they cut his cable line. So he made them run it along the fence line. They were hesitant at first, but they did it. Also they only bury it a couple inches.
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When the city was resurfacing the street in front of Larry’s house and putting in new sidewalks, the lines got cut all up and down the street. The “get service restored asap” crews would tap into the closest functioning line - usually on the other side of the street - and run the temp cable accordingly. Very few residences sport fewer than three cars, so they got rolled over A LOT. While I can’t speak for regular cable, that formerly-verizon-now-frontier-fios-fiber stuff is pretty tough.
When he switched to Spectrum, their lines are down the alley, and his line was festooned like garland along his fence prior to buryment.
edit: I was just remembering when I switched from Time-Warner to Verizon Fios: The new service was installed, I had returned all the Time/Warner boxes to the local service office, had gotten a refund check for unused service (they billed a month in advance). Then out of the blue, I got a really snotty message in the mail from somebody purporting to be a service auditor for Time-Warner, accusing me of stealing services, assuring me that I had been cut off and I just better not go trying to scam their company. I called, but couldn’t get through to customer service, so when I had a friend out doing some other stuff for me, asked if he would (literally) cut the cable off my house. He was concerned about doing so but just throwing the line in the alley, because (technically) still live electrical current. He didn’t want curious kids electrocuting themselves. So we compromised with him cutting it off my house, then going into the alley and cutting it off high enough above the ground that it couldn’t be reached without assistance. It’s still dangling today. 14 years later.
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Nobody ever mentioned that to me.
Thanks all for the answers!
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In my experience working for one of the regional telcos, the provider’s technician performs troubleshooting and any direct premises/provisioning issues while an entirely different contractor - usually with directional boring equipment - does the burial.
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I find your likely more realistic interpretation less humorous.
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Oh, the two men and almost a truck line burial crews are pretty funny. Their trucks are as barely holding together as the spectrum branded trucks that do the initial install are shiny. This last crew apparently replaced the sprinkler valve box that terminated their conduit under the alley with some rocks and broken concrete high enough it could take out mower blades if not seen in advance. I need to dig that up sometime this winter and put back a sprinkler valve box.
The guy who replaced our line for age and the center pin no longer adequately protruding said that in our area the crews were supposed to replace his temporary run with new cable, but that they rarely did, and he coiled up extra cable in the yard, so they could cut off and discard what got driven over in the alley.
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Spectrum still does Burial, but AT&T doesn’t anymore for Fiber in most cases, so they ran an ariel from the pole down the power lines to my parents house. I had a cable buried a year earlier at another property and demanded to know why. They said the cable was more delicate and they never buried with conduit. Even if a blade from a lawnmower didn’t hit it, they had cracking issues. Since conduit was going to run more they decided to eat the potential repairs from an ariel since it’s cheaper in the long run.
Ariel runs only work where poles exist. And usually If they do, the cable winds up overhead as well from what I’ve seen.
Well I hope I wasn’t the only one wondering about Ariel. I thought for a minute it was the newest fastest cable/internet service.
While looking up Ariel, I put 2 & 2 together aerial ran cable…
Well yeah; however it wasn’t until recently that they would do this for the final termination at the customer, they would still bury it.
Right on up there with the elusive Right Angel in construction.
Aerial plant is markedly faster and cheaper to run during brownfield deployment; buried plant for a brownfield generally dedicates >20% of the budget to cover damage. For greenfield deployment, bury that sh_t wholesale before pavement, sprinklers, sidewalks, power lines, gas lines, water lines, sewer lines are buried … vaguely somewhere … to be hit.
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You should only feel bad if you stop your tires on the cable and then peel out. To paraphrase Nixon, “You could do that, but it would be wrong.” 
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This is kind if cable company related has anyone ever removed the big honking battery that Verizon leaves in your garage. We do not have phone service anymore so do not need it as a back up. I do not think removing it would affect our ATT internet service.
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Please let me know if you find out how to or what to do with it! Mine had the battery beeping non-stop for the last few months because I think it was finally dying. I unplugged everything on the box except the battery. It finally died and stopped beeping. Thank god! Now I want the stupid thing gone!