Despite the recent high-profile hooh-hah over the future of British broadband and the projected cost of £15billion for a full-on FTTH network, it turns out that a more cost-effective solution has been staring them in the face all along. Sort of.
A company called H20 Networks has been in negotiations with water firms for the last five years to roll out fibre optic networks using the existing networks of sewer conduits.
This method of cable delivery has been alternately called Focus (short for Fibre Optical Cable in Underground Sewers) and Dark Fibre and has already been successfully trialled in top universities across the country. Students in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Bournemouth are already enjoying ultra high-speed fibre connections with speeds of up to 20Gbps - that’s gigabits per second, not megabits.
A Gigabit is about 1024 times bigger than a Megabit, and therefore that’s exciting enough to warrant highlighting part of the previous sentence in bold. According to H20 Networks MD Elfed Thomas, it cost Napier University in Edinburgh just “£80,000 to have a 1.2km fibre network [installed]. With a traditional fibre network these costs would have been in the region of £400,000 to £1.2 [million].”
By ‘traditional’ Mr Thomas means digging up roads which is not only a slower, more expensive option, but is also disruptive to roads and traffic. According to the BBC website, there are 360,000 miles of sewers in the UK; if fibre optic connections were unrolled throughout all of the sewers in the country, going by the above example this would cost approximately under £4bn.
He continues; “We [have] this big infrastructure problem in the UK and we had this existing ducting and I just thought why can’t we use the sewers?”
Whilst this would certainly save on installation costs, there are concerns about leakage from sewers into houses via a cable connection. Using the existing network of sewers would not provide connections to more remote areas, but Mr Thomas is confident that “We can bring the nearest fibre to within ten miles of villages,” he said. Using sewers for fibre provision is not new. Japan has a fairly widespread sewer-based fibre network and in Paris, a similar system is being unrolled.
H20 Networks motto is ‘Using the past to connect the future’, and they clearly think that despite concerns, that the ancient British sewer system is more than up to the job. They have ISP Ask4 convinced as well – they signed up with H20 in March this year, offering ‘25 Meg’ connections to residential customers living in the Yorkshire area.
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