By Andy McCue, 2 March 2007 16:15
NEWS
Underground sewer pipes are being used by Bournemouth Borough Council to cut the cost and disruption of laying new broadband internet cabling.
Around 1,400 metres of the 18mm fibre optic cable has been laid through the town's sewer network, owned by Wessex Water, using ready-made ducts to push the cable through and save the cost and time usually taken digging up roads.
Bournemouth is using the fibre optic cable underground sewer (Focus) system developed by UK company H20 Networks.
Bob Rhodes, IT manager at Bournemouth Borough Council, said laying the cable, which will mainly be used as back up to the authority's existing BT network, has resulted in a "tremendous cost saving".
He told silicon.com: "This is ideal for resilience. Going deep in the sewers it is less likely to be hit by a JCB digger. It gives us complete alternative routing."
He said the armoured cabling is also strong enough to prevent communications being taken out by sewer rats chewing through it.
Elfed Thomas, MD for H2O Networks, claimed it is 80 per cent faster to lay cables in the sewers and said it offers organisations a fixed-term cost rather than bandwidth tariffs, which means no further charges are incurred when extra capacity is needed.
Comments
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1. Darrall
Explain to me how, when a sewer line needs replacing because it pre 1900's, you can continue to provide fibre connectivity without circuit interruption; or is this plan just waiting till the s**t hits the proverbial fan. Doesn't sound like a common sense approach to me just an interim stop-gap to get over the exorbitant costs that Telco’s push onto subscribers of network services that go beyond their local loops? If this was the plethora for delivering IP services I would expect to see all companies that run their own private trunking (gas, water, power) offering the same deals. This all smell a little foul and I don't think it has anything to do with sewers. After all we can’t get ‘services’ providers to dig up the streets at the same time!!
2. Peter Lewis
Want to know how it's possible to continue to provide fibre connectivity when replacing parts of the sewer (or any other) network?
Most local fibre networks are designed as logical rings. Temporary breaks in the ring just mean that the traffic passes the other way round. Even without 'old' sewers, and with fibres laid in trenches, it's normal to design like this.