Fiber - super fast broadband :-D

[pdw8]

They wont be rolling fibre out of your bog mate, they will roll it to a box on the street and then do a dig to each house as they did with Cable

Yeah I realised that but there is no way they could afford to do street digs and also many local councils would never grant permission.

 

[Rich]

Yeah I realised that but there is no way they could afford to do street digs and also many local councils would never grant permission.

NTL did it. They will too. When they say they are using the sewers, they dont literally mean sending packets riding down there on fresh turds. They mean using the main sewage lines to host the bulk of the cabling . They wont be using the ones in front of your house im betting. There will be other ways to do the last xxx yards.



Hmmm. Wonder if there is an RFC for Turd bound packet transmission?

 

[mrk]

When people say they are getting *** pings they might mean it literally!

Heh.

Anyway it's still a good move

You might not be able to download a single file at full speed on such a connection on most sources but there's nothing to stop you taking advantage of that bandwidth and downloading multiple files to make up the overall bandwidth like I often do on 20MB!

 

[bigredshark]

NTL did it. They will too. When they say they are using the sewers, they dont literally mean sending packets riding down there on fresh turds. They mean using the main sewage lines to host the bulk of the cabling . They wont be using the ones in front of your house im betting. There will be other ways to do the last xxx yards.

Hmmm. Wonder if there is an RFC for Turd bound packet transmission?

But does that really work, my understanding (though lets face it I'm not an expert in how sewers work) is that the systems are local. ie all the homes in a town are connected one or two local treatment works. Are there sewers between towns??

Even if they are just using it for backbone as well, there are good alternative to that which work out pretty cheap. For instance fibrenet (now part of Global Crossing) laid a whole heap of their UK fibre in partnership with network rail along railway tracks, which was probably very cheap compared to the alterntives.

Overall I'm not convinced of the commercial potential of the idea, the costs of laying fibre to the home (or even street box), even using sewers for the bulk of cabling is going to be very high. They need to be thinking very long term to get the money back and with the competition they'll face it's a dangerous game...

 

[Rich]

My point is that I think they will use the sewers for backbone, as you have said. They wont use it for rolling right into the house. They will roll out to a street or borough level and then have some sort of local break-out much like NTL do.

 

[Trifid]

And it will not happen nationwide unless the gouvernment give a grant, and that is most likely going to go to BT. If Fiber is installed then BT can remove and sell the copper phone lines to even further subsidise their costs.