H2O: “Six to ten” towns and cities due to follow Dundee and Bournemouth with sewer fibre
The Victorians probably did not realise that the sewers they built would one day provide a potential means for rolling out fibre across the country. However, that is the business plan of infrastructure builder H2O which, as the name suggests, lays fibre through sewers to minimise disruption on the surface.
The company begins work on a Bournemouth network this September and then will begin work in Dundee in January. Each £30m project is expected to take between two to two and a half years to complete but at the end of the process, H2O’s CEO Elfed Thomas reveals, households and businesses could have a 100Mbps service.
“Some people say customers wouldn’t know what to do with a connection that big but we feel it will allow all manner of services, such as high definition television,” he says.
“It’s obviously a big bonus for an area to have such fast links and that’s why we’ve worked in Bournemouth and Dundee. We were doing some fibre work for the councils and they asked us if we could roll out the network across the wider area because they realise it will give their businesses a cutting edge at the same time as it links government buildings, such as hospitals, council offices and libraries at unprecedented speeds.”
Within the next year Thomas reveals the company will announce between six to ten additional projects to provide fibre to the home and promises an announcement ’shortly’ on the company which will lease its networks and sell broadband and associated services direct to consumers and businesses.
Sheffield-based ISP, Ask4, is already using fibre laid by H2O in Huddersfield to link two buildings and, in September, will switch on a more ambitious fibre ring laid for it by the company in Sheffield. It will link thousands of students in halls of residence as well as apartment blocks in the city.
“We specialise in multi tenancy buildings because laying down the network is expensive so we need a lot of people in the same building to make the economics work,” reveals Jonathan Hudson, Managing Director of Ask4.
“We’ll have something like four to five thousand students on the system in Sheffield come September and then the network will be rolled out until it’s available to tens of thousands of people.”
Ask4 offers services nationwide and has its own fibre networks (or at least fibre links between buildings it offers services to) in Sheffield, Huddersfield, London and Manchester and plans to roll out additional fibre rings where contract wins require.
Whilst many student and some apartment tenants have the Ask4 service included in rent, those paying directly for the service have an option of a symmetrical 4Mb connection for £15 per month, 10Mb (£25) and 25Mb (£50). For an extra £30 per year Ask4 also offers an IPTV service, currently offering Freeview channels, but more are “on the way”, as well as an online back-up service. A VoIP package is also available and Hudson makes the point that this means people can get online and have a phone up and running the instant they move in to an apartment or student room and so do not have to wait for, as well as pay for, a BT line.
Of course, using the sewers and other equally inventive means to provide next generation broadband services is hardly news. Generally speaking, such initiatives have failed to materialise into anything beyond small local deployments. Clearly there is need for inventive approaches such as H2O’s, but they will require significantly more investment and backing to expand nationally. This, given the current climate, may be easier said than done as H2O has £0.75m of debt on its last published balance sheet and will be looking to borrow heavily to fund the projects outlined above.
While we praise their ambition and enthusiasm a company with 4 employees has some way to go before it can deliver major £30m infrastructure projects.
