UK’s first “Fibrecity” Bournemouth to offer super-fast sewer broadband
Bournemouth, the UK’s first “Fibrecity”, will have fibre optic cables laid in its sewers to enable high-speed broadband.
Bournemouth is the first UK town to have super-fast fibre optic broadband laid in its sewers – the first stage of which will happen this week as residents are invited to get connected for free.
As one of the largest “Fibrecity” projects in Europe and the first in the UK, H2O Networks Ltd will fund and provide the network of fibre optical cable across the town at a cost of around £30 million.
The work is scheduled to start in September, but this week, all home and business premises within the Bournemouth Borough Boundary will receive letters asking them to grant permission for their free connection.
By using the waste water network, the company will install its patented FS (Fibre Optical Cable Underground Sewer) System, and deliver ultra high bandwidth to all Bournemouth’s businesses and more than 88,000 homes at speeds far exceeding current DSL or cable modem speeds, typically by tens or even hundreds of Mbps.
Users will be able to access FTTH (Fibre to the home), the fastest way of sending and receiving data – meaning faster downloads and a wealth of communication opportunities to improve people’s lives and the environment.
The benefits to homes and businesses are considerable. Home users will be able to take advantage of services such as IPTV and home medical monitoring and businesses will have 22nd Century connectivity at their fingertips.
Estimated to take about two years in total, the work needed to connect each home and business premise will be completed very quickly. Furthermore, due to the use of the sewer systems, the normally associated installation costs are reduced and this should be reflected in any competitive service package.
Councillor Nick King, the Council’s Cabinet Member for Communications, said: “Bournemouth is incredibly privileged to have been chosen as the UK’s first Fibrecity. This decision is a giant leap forward and gives us a real competitive advantage. Bournemouth really needs to embrace the many advantages that being a Fibrecity will bring and I am sure it will bring massive rewards to all homes and businesses that sign up to the services that this network will enable.
“The Council has already installed H2O Networks’ high speed fibre to its offices and the Bournemouth International Centre (BIC) and Pavilion Theatre, so we are aware of the difference this type of connectivity can make.”
Fibrecity deployments are far kinder to the environment than traditional methods of fibre deployment, as the sewer is a ready-made duct which means the expensive and environmentally unfriendly method of digging up the roads is unnecessary and disruption to the road infrastructure is kept to a minimum. In addition, the system is at least 80% faster than traditional methods.
Where the sewers are not viable, H2O Networks will install the cable using its patented BMD (Blown Mini Duct) system. With this method, a small 20 millimetres (mm) wide slot is channelled into the road in order to lay the cable. This is not a civil dig and will cause minimal disruption to the local area.
For more information visit: www.fibrecity.eu
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This is great news. I never thought that there could be a super fast fibre optic internet connection than the kind of connection speeds we have now.
Congratulations to the Engineers at H2O Networks.
July 25th, 2008 at 8:02 pmMany broadband customers in the UK have insufficient connectivity bandwidths that just can’t cope with demand. This is just the start of bringing next generation connectivity to the UK, where at the moment consumers have difficulty obtaining even 2Mb of download speeds, fibre optics can deploy speeds in excess of 100Mbps. Hope the process of deploying a nationwide network of Fibrecity doesn’t take too long!
August 19th, 2008 at 12:21 pmI’m just hoping I can recieve this service as l live in between Bournemouth and Poole - please give me this god. Please if you can hear me god, please make the engineers do this for me! I need that 100mbps connection - in return I promise to be a very good boy.
December 22nd, 2008 at 7:11 pm1) How will these fibre lines be protected from rats?
2) Hope everyone on these high speed lines will remember that if you design your web pages (graphics) for these high speeds that users on significantly lower speeds will be terribly frustrated with attempting sites that need the high broadband speeds and will give up acccessing your sites.
3) I suspect that users will end up in exactly the same predicament as present, as performance will be affected by number of users and the type of download/upload of thse users.
January 29th, 2009 at 12:22 pmThis is all good & fine but…no ISP’s have signed up as yet so currently it will be a cable in the sewer & that’s it….
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:37 pmCould you explain what exactly it is your talking about Richard Jenner as I develop websites in my spare time and that doesn`t make much sense too me..I upload a website to a server where people from around the world access it from, so how does my connection speed affect this??
September 10th, 2009 at 10:19 pmI thought Sky installed fibre optic cables yonks ago…why do we need more???
October 16th, 2009 at 5:20 pmjust had visit from fibrecity agent….demanding to know where we’d like our box installed. haven’t heard from them before, dont know anything about it , she wore an “official ” looking fluorescent jacket , and was full of dire warnings, such as “the old copper cables will be disconnected in 2012″….and “if you dont sign up now while im here , it’ll cost you £500 in the future”……I wonder what will happen if insufficient providers, or customers, sign up to “fibrecity”….oh…and perhaps I feel our overloaded sewage system doesn’t need a bunch of cables blocking it up….perhaps the sewage system is the best place for them…
October 16th, 2009 at 5:25 pmso if the objective is to have this rolled out nationwide…..what happens to those living in the country who arant connected to mains sewers?? or those living in towns in blocks of flats.?/ more pie in the sky “technology” from scousers hoping to cash in on more New Labour “plnas for the future”…totally unrealistic , unworkable , and pointless…
October 18th, 2009 at 11:18 amThis is the sort of technology that will finally put us on a par with the likes of Japan, great to see this is actually moving forward but I wonder if it will be restricted to the major towns and cities or if it will be extended to rural areas which suffer from the worst broadband speeds and need it most. If the goverment doens’t subsidise it I doubt this will happen as it’s just not commercially viable.
December 3rd, 2009 at 11:16 am