I obviously know that one is one and one is the other, but if you were on the street and saw a utility pole. How could You distinguish one to the other?
Power lines don't have insulation (the black plastic on the other wires) until it's getting attached to your house.
This topic is worth everyone's attention
Electrical cable is meant to carry power, lots of it. It doesn't matter so much as it can get interfered with, but does matter that it goes only to the right places, and not the wrong ones, which is why power cables use big insulators, and big connectors, and use big cables going to homes and businesses. Yes, they are what is higher on the telephone, because higher voltages require more separation from the people below. I will add, that for the most part, everybody gets the same power. What makes it theirs is the electric meter on the side of the house or store, or sometimes on a pole to the home. For communications, the name is getting the signal where it needs to be, with as little interference or loss. With that no external insulators are used. For traditional copper telephone lines, and to a degree fiber optics, a whole number of individual wires are in a cable. Each pair of wires is twisted to not interfere with others and reject outside noise, and connect with other cables or service drops with small connectors. Cable TV is signal, but because of frequency is on a coax. It id usually smaller than telephone feeders. It has cast aluminum boxes on it, for amplifiers, power injectors (which have a box which connects to the power lines on a pole), and taps to which customer drops connect.
On poles, electrical wires are always located above cable and phone lines. Commonly, you will see a high-voltage power distribution line at the top. This will consist of two or three wires, depending on whether it's single-phase or three-phase (where I live, it's 3-phase at 12,000 volts). The distribution transformers are located slightly below the HV lines. Then there is a set of household-voltage (120 / 240 volt) wires at an intermediate level. Sometimes there is only a 120 / 240 run (no HV wires), from a nearby transformer. At the lowest level, cable TV and phone lines are commonly placed close together, sometimes at the same height, and sometimes separated by a foot or two. Cable TV and phone lines can be differentiated by their appearance. Phone line connections are usually enclosed in weather-resistant boxes or cylinders, whereas cable TV drops are quite visibly connected to the bottom sides of the amplifiers and line taps.
