UK government outlines plans for full fibre in 15 years

[#1]

An interesting document to read in conjunction with the recent BT (and others) announcements?  Of course it is still just a policy and liable to funding changes. But worth a read.

UK government outlines plans for full fibre in 15 years

[#2]

It will never happen. FTTC will be considered good enough.

[#3]

Interesting.

Where I live (a London borough that never had a cable TV franchise), Virgin are putting in fibre as part of their network expansion at the moment.

From the look of it, they seem to be intending to install blown fibre. I'll be interested to see how this goes and assuming they pass my door (for complex reasons around borough boundaries they may not) I might take them up on "fibre to the home".

Given their current rate of progress I think I'll have plenty of time to decide....

Based on this and the length of time these "physical infrastructure" project take, even 15 years from a political announcement isn't long.

It's also easy to say "fibre to the home" but what would that be ?

I doubt it would be a dark fibre (or pair) back to the exchange so are we looking at a DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) wavelength per household and/or some sort of TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) system ?

I also wonder if, for homes such as mine, which have a "slung" copper cable the new network would have some sort of powered "outdoor box" with a copper connection (say gigabit Ethernet which also supplies power) to an "indoor box" which replaces the domestic router. 

To allow third party products (the Netgears etc. of the current infrastructure) there needs to be a widely adopted standard, perhaps like the interaction with the Openreach modem used for "Fibre To The Cabinet".

[#4]

Yup that's interesting @markhawkin as you say.

I live in a London borough, my story is weird. When I moved around 7 years ago, I could not get Fibre in my area and wanted faster speeds than just ADSL. Cable has been down my road for years .. The Fibre date got put back around 3 or 4 times. I got fed up with waiting and my mate said "Well you can get cable, go for that". So I did.

Given there is pretty much only one cable company in this country now, I don't need to tell you who they are.

I can get Fibre now, but cable is working fine for me now - so no reason to change at the moment.

My parents are quite far from the exchange, I know roughly where it is. As expected the internet speed was poor because of it. They have never been able to get cable - it has never been installed down their road and there doesn't look like there are any plans to. They could get then get Fibre, I got complains about the poor speeds so I switched them over to Fibre which has been fine.

Strange as they live in the same London borough as me, not that far away. Their road is a main road and quite busy. I can only suspect the install costs will be too high to justify any increase in business.

So they're on Fibre as they don't have cable, and I am on cable as I couldn't get Fibre.

Fun and games 

[#5]

Surely BT could rip out some (but not all) of the copper when they convert a cabinet to fibre.

A few tons of copper would pay for a fair bit of fibre.

[#6]

Hyperoptic offer up to 1Gbps speeds for £49/month for the first 12 months incl. a phone service, but it's not all that widely available.

[#7]

Leaving aside whether Hyperoptic’s solution would be the same as deployed in a universal Fibre To The Home roll out, how does it work?

I assume a router with a fibre connection and a single core per house, perhaps using DWDM and time division between the two directions.

Are there active boxes in the street or is it optical back to the “exchange”?

[#8]

Answering my own question (with a link) I find Hyperoptic don’t really have a physical network at all!

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/hyperoptic-fibre-broadband-review/

It seems that they lease an Openreach circut to a block of flats and then fibre the block.

A perfectly sensible approach but not something one could use as a model for a national roll out. It is also a gigabit at 50:1 contention (so around 50 users could share the Openreach tail) although untll a building reaches that level of customer sign up it will be much less.

Interesting but not a model for the future.

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@markhawkin wrote:

Leaving aside whether Hyperoptic’s solution would be the same as deployed in a universal Fibre To The Home roll out, how does it work?

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[#9]

But you could get Gigabit speeds in the middle of the night.