H20 Local fibre service for £699 a month

February 20, 2016

H2O Networks recently appeared in the news with a campaign for a roll-out of a true fibre-to-the-home service in various UK towns. A press release today provides detail of a dark fibre service that can be bought from the company.

H2O Networks will install a dark fibre from £699 per month in a local area as a point-to-point connection. Meaning that it links two sites together over a passive optical fibre. It does not include Internet access. This may appear expensive but considering that you could exploit this fibre for bandwidths of up to 1Gbps (or possibly multiples of 10Gbps depending on the quality of the fibre and your resources), its value becomes clearer.

Elfed Thomas (Managing Director), H2O Networks stated “Dark fibre is a much overlooked, but totally viable solution to solve the UK’s bandwidth needs […] BT set the bandwidth tariff about 30 years ago and not only is it hugely expensive, it is also extremely restrictive. No-one could have predicted the current levels of demand for bandwidth, so the future lies with dark fibre.”

The major distinction with dark fibre is that the hardware you connect to each end of the link is completely your choice. Providing you with the flexibility of running an IP network, storage networks or video transmission. Possibly the fibre can be linked to a further network with onward links to the Internet, so for instance an Internet Service Provider may possibly provide true fibre optic speeds all the way to individual premises making 100Mbps and faster Internet connectivity an authentic possibility particularly in blocks of flats.

The baseline figure of £699 a month is for a ceiling of 1.5 km of dark fibre. Quotes for longer distances can be obtained from H20 Networks. One possible use for this is allocations to areas where the existing copper local loop lengths are extremely long which produces slower speeds. By way of the sewer network to provide a cheaper solution for connecting a street cabinet in a broadband barren area, it becomes achievable to offer faster services to the community.