To print: Click here or Select File and then Print from your browser's menu

This story was printed from silicon.com, located at http://www.silicon.com/

Story URL: http://networks.silicon.com/broadband/0,39024661,39170280,00.htm

Five weird ways to bridge the digital divide
Planes, balloons and 'white spaces'...?

By Natasha Lomas

Published: Thursday 06 March 2008

Sewers

Several companies are donning gloves and wellies and poking around in the murky subterranean depths of towns and cities in order to pipe high speed broadband into people's homes.

This method sees fibre cable - for really high-speed broadband - laid in existing sewage ducts, a cheaper and faster way of hooking people up than digging up streets where legacy copper wiring lives. As if sewers weren't useful enough already.

H2O Networks, one company currently splashing around in the UK's drains, is aiming to hook up whole towns with super-fast 100Mbps broadband access over the coming years.

Making use of sewer infrastructure in this way could see smaller towns, such as Bournemouth and Northampton, steal a march on larger entities such as London and Manchester - as H2O said, the latter cities are too big to tackle at this stage.

Click here to see photos of fibre-down-the-drains deployment.

Power surge… click for page 3...