bit-tech.net

South Yorkshire gets 25Mb/s fibre

Published on 25th November 2009 by Gareth Halfacree

South Yorkshire is at the heart of a £90 million investment scheme that will see 25Mb/s broadband offered to all.

The North is due to get some broadband love for a change with network specialist Thales signing a £90 million deal to bring 25Mb/s fibre-to-the-cabinet to homes across South Yorkshire.

The rollout of fibre-to-the-cabinet, which promises to bring guaranteed 25Mb/s speeds to 500,000 homes and 40,000 businesses across South Yorkshire, is set to begin in 2010 and hopefully finish in 2012. The funding for the £90 million project comes from a £30 million grant from the European Regional Development Fund, a further £13.6 million from the Yorkshire Forward business development agency, and the remainder from Yorkshire, Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster councils.

As always, it's not money for nothing: the councils hope to recoup their investment by offering wholesale broadband and backhaul transit to ISPs, who will in turn offer the 25Mb/s connectivity package to the area's residents and businesses. Sadly for those who had visions of free 25Mb/s 'net connections, the project is merely providing the infrastructure - access will be via the traditional monthly payment to an ISP.

According to IT Pro, Thales is in talks with various companies with regards to the commercialisation of the network - "all the obvious candidates and a lot of local ones, as well" according to Phil Hodge, next generation broadband manager at the company - with the hope that many will be willing to sign once trials have proven successful in the new year.

Sadly, pricing has not yet been mentioned - although according to Hodge the cost of developing and implementing the system won't prevent "the wholesale prices [from being] set to be competitive with what's out there already."

Are you pleased to see councils taking access to broadband networking seriously, or do you think that £90 million for a measly 25Mb/s connection is insulting? Share your thoughts over in the forums.

33 Comments

Discuss in the forums Reply

barndoor101 25th November 2009, 10:36

I suppose they had to find a way to unclog the backlog of sheep porn downloads.

Hardware150 25th November 2009, 10:36

pft the north, south yourkshire is south of me D:

Quote:

Originally Posted by barndoor101
I suppose they had to find a way to unclog the backlog of sheep porn downloads.

Think you're thinking of Wales there

impar 25th November 2009, 10:47

Greetings!

Am curious...
What is the best service available to UK consumers, bandwidth-wise?

Venares 25th November 2009, 10:54

50 Mbit Down / 1.5Mbit Up
Pretty pathetic compared to the rest of the world tbh.

andrew8200m 25th November 2009, 10:58

On business line here, get 60mbit up, 60mbit down. Nothing wrong with that :D

andy

dolphin-promotions 25th November 2009, 11:01

@andrew8200m who do you get that off? And for how much per month?

andrew8200m 25th November 2009, 11:07

Not a clue who it's off in allhonesty, it's provided to us by the company so that we can use vmware to run server 2003 and then access the exact same server over at hq in real time. Not a clue who any of it works, I just do it and it runs. Never been one for networking.

Andy

Baz 25th November 2009, 11:25

Lease lines like your 60mbit down/60mbit up cost serious cash per month - many hundreds of pounds, if not thousands.

Good to see BB infrastructure improvements like these. Even with the rollout of BT's 21stC network the UK is embarrassingly behind the global leaders in internet speeds. I wish we could rip out the ageing copper network and get fibre to cabinet everywhere but the investment required would be frightening.

It's disgraceful that Virgin Media offers such a shoddy upload speed on its network though. I suppose it's designed for consumers, not producers but if you want to use online storage for example it's crap.

Psytek 25th November 2009, 11:27

In my mind, until I see 100up/100down, I will consider britain to be lagging behind other developed nations.
Sadly The USA will be the dealbreaker in all of this. As long as they don't have next generation broadband, applications won't be developed to take advantage of the speeds, and everything will stagnate until they catch up, which will probably be around the time the UK catches up, which is to say, if it happened tomorrow, it would already be late.

javaman 25th November 2009, 11:44

Even if they do have to pay, its about time some sort of upgrade was made. Was it one this site or the news they where saying about using the old analogue transmitters to get broadband to all? Wonder how fast and how much it will cost

Artanix 25th November 2009, 12:05

lol if thales are doing it, then i wouldn't get your hopes up. They recently lost all their contract's with our company for generally being crap and really slow to fix stuff. Could be amusing :)

jase4772 25th November 2009, 12:26

It's one thing to say these places are getting this, what they don't mention yet is whats areas. I live in Doncaster but no where near the town center and you just know that it's only a radius of 1-2 miles from there that will get it. With any luck they'll target areas that are not able to get cable broadband so more people have access to faster speeds.

mclean007 25th November 2009, 13:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by Venares
50 Mbit Down / 1.5Mbit Up
Pretty pathetic compared to the rest of the world tbh.

Except the USA, where they would give their left arm for speeds like that, and most European countries, where that is competitive, and South America, and most of Asia (excluding S. Korea and Japan), and Australasia. 50 meg down is perfectly adequate for pretty much any legitimate domestic use, up to and including streaming multiple 1080p HD streams, and 1.5 meg up is more than enough for most.

Our infrastructure isn't perfect by any means, but it is improving and we are keeping pace with most of the world. Yes there are the high profile fibre rollouts in S. Korea, Japan, Sweden and very limited city centre areas in France, but these are the exception, not the rule. Those places have a big advantage over the UK in that they aren't trying to upgrade a triumph of Victorian engineering to cope with uses for which it simply wasn't designed - while those countries were still mucking about with telegrams and carrier pigeons the UK had a fairly sophisticated (by early 20th Century engineering standards) and wide reaching public telephone network. As I'm sure many of us on bit-tech know all too well, one drawback of being an early adopter is you can get left with a big investment in obsolete kit, and that is where the UK is now.

BT is doing its bit, rolling out fibre to the cabinet at least, which should give wide access to 40 mb/s services. Virgin is already offering 50 mb/s in cabled areas. Fibre to the home is a bit of a pipedream at the moment, but to be honest if you need more than 40/50 meg you aren't within the normal envelope of domestic use and it is reasonable to expect you to pay for a business oriented solution.

m0rt 25th November 2009, 13:21

Guess I'll be lucky living in Sweden. I have 100/100mbit fiber för 100skr a month, that is 8.88gbp with today's exchange rate. And I've had that for 5 years soon. Even had 2 100/100mbit lines for a while =D

mclean007 25th November 2009, 13:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by m0rt
Guess I'll be lucky living in Sweden. I have 100/100mbit fiber för 100skr a month, that is 8.88gbp with today's exchange rate. And I've had that for 5 years soon. Even had 2 100/100mbit lines for a while =D

Go on, rub it in, you smug Swede.

TomH 25th November 2009, 14:03

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baz
Lease lines like your 60mbit down/60mbit up cost serious cash per month - many hundreds of pounds, if not thousands.

About £500/month for a leased 100Mbit Ethernet connection from Manchester to London. And then, it's only dark fibre from the office to data centre - still have to provide your own transit to the Internet when it gets there.

But for that money you do get some epic monitoring. Turn it off, within 5 minutes there's a personal e-mail, in another 5 there's a phone call. If only BT/VM cared quite so much... :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by mclean007
Our infrastructure isn't perfect by any means, but it is improving and we are keeping pace with most of the world. Yes there are the high profile fibre rollouts in S. Korea, Japan, Sweden and very limited city centre areas in France, but these are the exception, not the rule. Those places have a big advantage over the UK in that they aren't trying to upgrade a triumph of Victorian engineering to cope with uses for which it simply wasn't designed - while those countries were still mucking about with telegrams and carrier pigeons the UK had a fairly sophisticated (by early 20th Century engineering standards) and wide reaching public telephone network. As I'm sure many of us on bit-tech know all too well, one drawback of being an early adopter is you can get left with a big investment in obsolete kit, and that is where the UK is now.

BT is doing its bit, rolling out fibre to the cabinet at least, which should give wide access to 40 mb/s services. Virgin is already offering 50 mb/s in cabled areas. Fibre to the home is a bit of a pipedream at the moment, but to be honest if you need more than 40/50 meg you aren't within the normal envelope of domestic use and it is reasonable to expect you to pay for a business oriented solution.

Quote for truth. The amount of times I've had to explain to people what the "broadband tax" (uninformed, idiotic, daily-heil nomenclature that it is) was really for, has been ridiculous.

Virgin Media's service, whilst advertising nice-looking numbers, is incredibly over-sold and doesn't represent the same quality of service that you could obtain by paying the same amount of money to a service-orientated (as opposed to sales-orientated) ISP for an ADSL2+ service.

In reality though, unless I'm downloading ISO-sized files, I really don't notice a huge amount of difference between a symmetric 100Mbit connection and my 6Mbit/500Kbit ADSL at home, and there's even less difference when compared to the 11Mbit/1.5Mbit BeThere connection that I used to enjoy.

logan'srun 25th November 2009, 14:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by m0rt
Guess I'll be lucky living in Sweden. I have 100/100mbit fiber för 100skr a month, that is 8.88gbp with today's exchange rate. And I've had that for 5 years soon. Even had 2 100/100mbit lines for a while =D

+1 god I miss my 100/100 line when was I was living downtown.

Now its 24/4 (upspeed may vary) and I can't convince my wife to let me pull in 100/100 for our house (would be the only one in the neighborhood) since the cost for the work is close to 40,000sek. now if I can convince my neighbors that it's necessary then we can all split that cost. . . .

Cerberus90 25th November 2009, 14:57

noooo, they need to come and upgrade Leicestershire/Warwickshire rural broadband.

Abhorsen 25th November 2009, 15:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hardware150
pft the north, south yourkshire is south of me D:

Quote:
Originally Posted by barndoor101
I suppose they had to find a way to unclog the backlog of sheep porn downloads.

Think you're thinking of Wales there

Yorkshire is north.

Booya! Finally a decent net connection for me!

Cupboard 25th November 2009, 15:31

I am surprised that they are only running 25Mb to the kerb. That seems awfully slow when you consider the number of people that it could be serving and it also allows little upgradability compared to if they had put a faster thing in to start with.
That is unless you can easily speed it up by changing a simple module at either end.

Rkiver 25th November 2009, 15:34

Ireland has had fibre to the door for quite a while...come on England, catch up.

haakon.t 25th November 2009, 15:40

I live in the countryside in Norway, and afaik the fastest line available here is 100Mbit/100Mbit for about 1500 NOK or 150 £ a month, including 60 tv channels and free phone service to landline phones in Norway. We're getting 1Gbit/1Gbit at the start of next year though :D

Unknownsock 25th November 2009, 16:18

This is all good but who's gonna convince my idiotic landlord to wire up my flat with cable?

Shadowed_fury 25th November 2009, 16:49

Argh, sort mine :P

cool_dude 25th November 2009, 16:50

they should be sorting the capital first :p

sheepanator 25th November 2009, 18:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hardware150
pft the north, south yourkshire is south of me D:

Quote:
Originally Posted by barndoor101
I suppose they had to find a way to unclog the backlog of sheep porn downloads.

Think you're thinking of Wales there

+1 on all

when they get to north yorkshire (the best place on earth :) ) they should have speeds like 10gb/s speeds like on some japanese lines

metarinka 25th November 2009, 19:31

The US seriously lags behind, I believe AT&T finally started rolling out a fibre to the door plan offering BLAZING 25 mb/s down. In large US cities. Some tiny municipalities are starting to offer county wide free wireless or fibre as pay-for providers refuse to build the infastructure.

as an example my good friend lives in south lyon michigan. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=south+lyon,+mi&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=48.956293,114.169922&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=South+Lyon,+Oakland,+Michigan&ll=42.474123,-83.599091&spn=0.71815,1.783905&z=10

not more than 15 miles from either ann arbor or detroit, yet he can only get 28.8K dial up, that's right the signal degrades too much to get 56K.

The country side of the US has hit a serious digital divide.

sear 25th November 2009, 19:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by Venares
50 Mbit Down / 1.5Mbit Up
Pretty pathetic compared to the rest of the world tbh.

You realise that South Korea and Scandinavia are the only places in the world with proper high-speed connections as standard, right? North American the telecom companies squeeze out in some cases a hundred dollars a month for speeds as paltry as 5 Mbps. In Canada, our ISPs are stifled by the company who owns most of the phone lines in the country, by throttling all their traffic and essentially eliminating any competitive advantage they could offer. Don't even get me started about countries like Venezuela, or entire continents such as India and Africa. So no, the "rest of the world" does not have standard, accessible Internet access anywhere near 25 Mbps as standard, unless your "rest of the world" only includes an extremely small group of nations, restricted to the European Union and bits of Asia.

barndoor101 25th November 2009, 19:52

Surely they should get running water/electricity before having 25Mb/s fibre?

Sorry, Lancastrians hate yerkshire :D

mikeuk2004 25th November 2009, 20:18

I live directly in Sheffield City Centre in a new appartment block thats only a couple of years old and there is no cable in this area at all. They cabled around us lol and ran out of money.

I have ADSL because thats all I can have and can only have 6-7mb . So where is this 25mb going to be?

TomH 25th November 2009, 21:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikeuk2004
I live directly in Sheffield City Centre in a new appartment block thats only a couple of years old and there is no cable in this area at all. They cabled around us lol and ran out of money.

I have ADSL because thats all I can have and can only have 6-7mb . So where is this 25mb going to be?

Dug up around you - that's why it's costing so much. I'd be glad it wasn't Virgin bloody Media, in all honesty.

6-7Mbit seems very low for someone on a 21CN exchange, with plenty of LLU providers. BeThere's service was still awesome last I checked. :)

SMIFFYDUDE 25th November 2009, 23:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by barndoor101
Surely they should get running water/electricity before having 25Mb/s fibre?

Sorry, Lancastrians hate yerkshire :D

I live in an area that once belonged to Yorkshire but is now in Lancashire, Saddleworth. Living here has given me a complex, I hate it being part of Oldham borough but I don't want to be a Yorky either.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikeuk2004
I live directly in Sheffield City Centre in a new appartment block thats only a couple of years old and there is no cable in this area at all. They cabled around us lol and ran out of money.

Similar thing happened where I live. The surrounding council estates got hooked up, but not anywhere else as far as i know.

TWeaK 25th November 2009, 23:41

I live just outside Sheffield city centre (about 3km as the crow flies from the exchange) and I have Be broadband sold through a reseller (ADSL24). I was excited when I moved here that I'd be able to get on an LLU, but it turns out my line isn't capable of more than about 6Mbps :/ Hopefully though when they get this upgraded I should be able to get on a full package with not much extra cost - apparently ADSL24 have started offering C&W LLU service (purchased from Bulldog) for less than Be's.