100 Mbs UK broadband rollout confirmed via sewer systems

The idea of laying fibre along sewer lines has been sloshing aroundthe networking business for years. Now a UK firm claims today'sbroadband will seem a trickle compared to the torrents of data it'llsoon offer.
It's always been hard to argue with the logic. Sewers are deepunderground where cable would be protected from clumsy drilling. Theyalso run into the heart of virtually every building in Britain.
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Best of all, they were dug in the 19th century when Irish labour wascheap, and planning and safety restrictions were lax. You've just gotto buy cable that the rats can't gnaw into.

It all works in theory, and Merseyside-based H2O Networks says it'sfinally cracked the practical stuff. The good burghers of eitherBournemouth, Dundee or Northampton will be first to ride the 100Mbit/swave with fibre to their homes with plans to complete the first ofthree "Fibrecity" deployments within three years.

The final decision on who'll get the maiden rollout is set for Apriland will be made by whichever council gets its works permissions sortedfirst, according to H20 Networks managing director Elfred Thomas.Engineers should be on the ground in September, and work will becompleted in 18 months to two years, he said. The 100Mbit/s figure isclaimed as a minimum.

It's taken six years to get this far. "The negotiations with water companies are never easy," Thomas said.

Laying the trunk cables along sewer mains should be the easy partfor the engineers - the majority of the schedule will be devoted totaking the lines into homes. "The key factor is making sure we're inevery home," Thomas said.

H2O has already connected up university and council buildings in Bournemouth and Dundee via the sewers to prove its pitch.

The plan is for H2O as consumer provider to run the fibre networksas a wholesaler. It claims to be in "advanced talks" with ISPs andmajor TV providers to offer access to consumers. Thomas anticipates thecost of internet access via the sewers to be about the same as otherbroadband platforms, with extra services available on top.

Government, BT and Ofcom discussions on how to speed up the rest ofthe country's internet infrastructure are no threat to the plans,Thomas insists. "Subsidies ain't gonna happen," he said. "We're justgetting on with it and we don't need any government funding."

It's estimated that each of the three initial Fibre Cities (towns, really) will cost between £15m and £20m.

The timing of the announcement assures public interest in H2O'sproposition. The mainstream press has noticed in the last few monthsthat the UK is starting to look increasingly complacent, as Europeanand international rivals invest in speedy internet infrastructure.

Ofcom's consultation on the UK's way forward, launched in September, too heavily praised its own success in fostering competition in the existing flaky ADSL market for many tastes.

A freshly-dug ubiquitous national fibre network would come in atabout £15bn, it's reckoned. BT isn't going to stump up for that alone,preferring to limit its fibre investment to new builds where it's cheap, planning consent is in the bag, and nobody complains when you dig up the road.

Indeed, the popular view in the broadband business is that the nextgeneration networks we'll use to get online in the future will be apatchwork of cellular, wireless, fibre, and DSL technologies.

Cynics remind us that sewer fibre was last contemplated seriously bya gaggle of dark fibre startups during the dotcom boom, who insistedthe bandwidth would be needed imminently, and could be sold at a highprice. They were all flushed out when the results of the broadergreedfest hit the pan.

Maybe the sewer fibre evangelists were just stung by putting supplybefore demand last time round. Now there's BitTorrent, IPTV, YouTube,booming online gaming, and (judging by the email we get) a net populaceincreasingly frustrated by bandwidth-throttling, "unlimited" marketingand other chicanery employed by ISPs to beat a living out of the 20thcentury tubes.
We hope the current economic climate doesn't portend a dotcom fatefor H2O's ambitions. If nothing else it'll keep us all in puns foryears, and give the last laugh to Senator Ted Stevens: the internetreally will be a series of tubes. Sort of.