Superfast internet in sewer pipeline

Published on Saturday 2 February 2008 19:04

THE superfast internet of the future is set to arrive from a very surprising, and insanitary, place: the sewers.

And Dundee's sewers could be the first in the UK to carry internet at speeds 20 times those currently experienced by most households.

The new network of fibre optic cables will replace the often unreliable and slow telephone wire most broadband internet users rely on, allowing a full-length film to be downloaded in under three minutes and high-definition television to be streamed direct to computer screens.

Internet firm H2O is behind the plan and has identified Dundee, Bournemouth and Northampton as the first communities to get the service. They will announce later this year which is to be first. A spokeswoman said: "We are in talks with various agencies and Dundee will definitely be the first place in Scotland to get it, the only question is whether it will be the first place in the UK to receive it."

Using sewers for fibre optic cables avoids the expensive and disruptive alternative of digging up miles of pavements. In theory, any community with a sewer network can have the new service.

The cables will be laid using special devices which can run fibres through pipes without the need for engineers..

H2O estimates that cabling a town of 75,000 people could be done for as little as 10m, compared with the 70m it could cost if roads and pavements had to be dug up.

However, the company does have to dig up the final few metres of road from sewer to home to connect the service. This could cost 10 to 50 a metre.

Customers will sign up to the service through an internet service provider such as BT, Sky, or Virgin Media, who will rent access to the lines from H2O.

Although the company said it was too early to discuss pricing, the extra speed will have to be paid for. Virgin's fastest fibre optic internet is half the H2O speed and costs 47 a month.

The new service will run at a minimum of 100 megabits, or 12.5 megabytes, a second. For users that will mean:

&#149 An average MP3 song, about 3.5 megabytes, can be downloaded in about a quarter of a second.

&#149 Streaming of full-screen HDTV, which requires about 24 megabits per second, will become a reality for your PC.

&#149 A complete film file, about 1.7 gigabytes in size, will take 144 seconds.

&#149 Two full CDs of computer data can be transferred in 100 seconds.

Brian Baglow, chief executive of technology, communications and marketing firm Indoctrimat, said: "I think there will be tremendous demand for this and it will be a great step forward for users. The internet needs this expansion of capacity because of the sheer amount of information which is out there. It's going to mean that video-on-demand will be viable and it will be in high definition."

Internet users in Japan already enjoy internet speeds of over 90mbs in their homes and French users can surf at over 40mbs.

Not so fast

Broadband internet has almost completely replaced 'traditional' dial-up modems in the UK.

But broadband itself is often less than what buyers think they are getting. An advertised speed of eight or 10 Megabits per second might turn up to be much less because of congestion on lines.