Going Underground – Fibre through the Sewers?

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.

Average broadband speed rises along with complaints

A recent study by market research firm JD Power suggests that overall connection speed experienced by broadband users in the UK has increased, with the average connection rising from 3.5Mbps last year to 4.8Mbps – still way off from the average ‘up to’ connection speed of 10Mbps on offer, but signs that things are improving.

The same survey also found that the number of complaints made to ISPs over the phone have also increased, and now outweigh general service enquiries.

“Last year broadband was still a novelty and people were wowed by how much faster it was than dial-up,” said Caspar Tearle, director of service industries research at JD Power. “This year everyone expects it to be fast and get angrier when it doesn’t work.”

Many factors can compromise your connection speed – Cable users often find that their speed will be choked at peak times, when everyone in the local area is trying to access the network at the same time. The most common problem with ADSL is the distance between your house and the nearest telephone exchange, the greater the distance, the slower the speed will be – ASDL users can check here to see what line speed they are likely to get.

The survey also suggested that whilst broadband speeds in the UK might not be as lightning-quick as they are elsewhere in the world, the average price that the average UK resident pays for broadband is considerably less expensive than it is overseas.

Tiscali promise further investment in UK LLU

ISP Tiscali has unveiled its new long-term gameplan for the period between 2008 and 2012. Tiscali will primarily focus on the two European marketplaces where it has the strongest brand presence – the UK and Italy.

Firstly, Tiscali intend to consolidate on the gains they made in the UK by spending over £700m on LLU and fixing line problems with existing customers, hoping to double its current customer base of approximately 2 million by 2012. This is a fairly modest target when you consider that Tiscali’s expanding LLU network is set to cover 1,000 sites in 2008, and 1,100 sites in 2009, and therefore potentially reaching out to 17 million customers.

Tiscali are also set on pouring more cash into the Tiscali TV IPTV service as well as using it’s fairly recently acquired Pipex arm to target markets who are interested in hosting and purchasing IP’s.

Tiscali are currently ranked 4th in the UK Broadband Premiership, slightly behind Carphone Warehouse, and directly above Orange.

AOL Wireless Plus Free PlayStation 3

The Broadband Finder offices must be on some sort of leyline; as soon as we’d published the previous post about Nintendo providing Wii owners discounted browsing in Japan, we got this news through about the PS3.

As with the Dell laptop deal, which is still running, the 40GB version of Sony’s new superconsole, which is worth around £300, is being given away for FREE to customers who sign up the AOL Wireless Plus package along with the AOL Talk Pay As You Go phone plan for 2 years.

The £19.99 monthly broadband package offers an up to 8Mbps connection, 40GB download allowance, and a free wireless router worth £50. Customers not yet living in an AOL LLU area will have to pay an additional £10 a month.

The PlayStation 3 is undoubtedly the most powerful piece of hardware out there, but has not fared well against is lower-specced rivals, mostly due to the asking price of the machine being way out of most people’s budgets – this AOL deal represents a cost-effective way of getting your hands on a PS3, so long as your internet requirements are not likely to change over the next two years – 8Mbps and 40GB should suffice for general internet use.

We’ve experienced first hand the PS3 in action, and we have to say that Pro Evo 2008 looks and plays like a dream – this blog post would have been up before lunchtime today, but we were, erm, busy.