The obvious joke ...

The forthcoming reason for some of the utter cr@p you can browse and download ?

JDM

Obviously

This is a shitty idea.

I'll get me coat!

A whole new meaning for

packet loss?

Not a good idea in some parts

In some areas, the sewers are not that big - this is made worse by years of **** and **** and other noxious substances being washed down the various drains, along with other decaying matter which solidify, and then reduce the size of the aperture. Shoving a fibre cable along a narrow pipe makes it narrower - just wait for all the drains to start backing up and houses filling up with sewage.

But just how look how fast you can surf the pron sites - makes it all worthwhile!

Well, at least you worked "series of tubes" in there

but not a "huge pipe" joke to be seen...

/coat

Impractical.

But my toilet is quite a distance from my office and also having a wire poking out of the pan will make cleaning it rather awkward. Not to mention the rats clambering along the cable and finding their way out of the loo. The other option of having it trailing out from the kitchen sink would lead to it getting fouled on the blades of the waste disposal unit. This is madness.

Hmmm, 100Mbit/s residential connection. Blu-ray doesn't look so rosy if online content were to be available at those kind of bandwidths. The implications for installation are nonetheless a bit scary, with many variables at each location. Think about cowboy cable installers and then imagine them drilling holes in your waste plumbing, pulling out excrement covered cables, nooo!

Dundee *is* a City

With a population in excess of 200,000 it is officialy designated a City.

Perth on the other hand is, and always will be, a town because it's full of slackjawed yokels...

About time

well quite frankley i think its about time that someone went over BT's stranglehold of "we cannot be bothered" under the guise of cost. well done H20!!!

I for one..

...welcome out sewer-dwelling fibre overlords....

Idiots

You really think their cable will come out of your toilet?

It's not practical to run IP-over-SHIT into each house, it's more a technology that comes to the end/ middle of your street, using the sewer like a fscking big duct. The cable is brought out of the nearest suitable sewer manhole, and onto the pavement, into an enclosure. From that point on, fibre is run in a conventional manner to the end point.

That said, if there was a green box at the end of each street (a-la BT connection points that are littered all over our 'burbs), fed with multi-gigabits of connectivity, containing a small DSLAM, each home would be within a few metres of the "exchange", without having to dig a big long duct back to it.

Paris, because she'd be stupid enough to think it would just shine out the pan.

Underground dreams

Wouldn't like to use a packet sniffer on that network...

but will service be shit?

nuff said

Thomas Tit

Gives a whole new meaning to the term 'lay a cable'

Customer Service Calls

'My shitty pipe isn't working'

/Coat

@ Tony

But surely extra fibre keeps the pipes running smoothly....

Didn't Google get there first with the TiSP Beta first?

http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html

Mine's the one above the big wellies!

About time

There's a serious lack of fibre entering the sewers due to the unhealth British diet these days.

How?

The cheapest bit of laying the cables is the bits running down the street. For NTL, the gangs would be paid by the meter laid. They would then get 2x-3x the amount for the bit coming off the T-Junction to the little bit at the edge of the pavement outside your house.

How are they going to lay those T Junctions here? Dig up a little bit of road outside everyones house to reach down to the sewer? Would be loads more expensive, than just digging the footpaths up.

Only way I can see it working is them doing 1 sewer exit per 100m of street then sticking a wifi point on a big pole. OBviously that wouldnt be allowed because of "wifi damaging child"

The idea that linking to universities shows it works is madness because there is only 2 sections coming out of the sewer.

Aw Shit!

This is a shit hot idea!

Loss!

Looks like my connection has gone up sh*t creek!

COAT!

passing H20

So all the crap downloaded will be 'passing H20' in the sewers?

Ah, yes thankyou, the big black leather one thats looking a bit worn in places...

...thanks, I'll be off then...

Re: Idiots

> You really think their cable will come out of your toilet?

Are you an American? As you obviously don't get sarcasm. You'd think the 'Joke Alert' icon might give it away.

Anonymous Coward

"From that point on, fibre is run in a conventional manner to the end point."

To 26 million residential households, yeah right. Isn't that why the cable companies went broke / still haven't made any money? The down and dirty local loop is the expensive part, not the snazzy backbone! That's why BT still hold all the aces.

Obviously I don't expect cables running out of toilets, but the distribution from your 'convenient location' in the street is what will cost too much if you deploy 'conventional manner(s)'. What are you thinking, overheat cables from poles or dug-up pavements with ducts? Unless of course the 'convenient location' creates a national network of wireless access at suitable bandwidth...nice. I thought a major plus-point of such a pooh-band network would be to exit the BT local loop stranglehold which exists throughout much of the UK.

Paris to you for thinking that anyone reading this article really imagines cables running out of toilets except as the vehicle for a joke.

City/Town?

I was always taught that the difference betwen a City and a Town was basically if it had a cathedral, it was a City! Nothing to do with size.

Does this mean we are getting a new protocol?

S - Speedy

H - Home

I - Internet

T - Transmission

Protocol?

I don't have a coat, so I'll just be off then!

Google April Fools come to power....

http://www.google.com/tisp/

Maybe they arnt as daft as the smell funny

This Vs my landlord

Sorry, if im mising something here but..

If there is going to be a 100mbit fibre running almost to the front of my house (Well, i live on a 3rd floor flat) how will they then connect me from my flat to the fibre?

It seems to me, that people living in private buildings may not be able to get the permission for yet another cable to be drilled into a wall on my landlords building.

Weve just had one for Sky done, and that took some persuading.

@ Daniel Hall

Oh the joy of flats!! My friend just realised that on top of his £50 a month Sky+ subscription, he has to pay the flat management company a further £7 a month to use their dish as they won't allow him to have one put up!!

Maybe they will do something similar with a fibre network....or have a dataroom somewhere and share the connection like in serviced offices....whatever it is, you'll probably be paying more than if you lived in a house (and a faster connection)!!

I would imagine they'd use fibre as close to the building and ethernet from there...providing it's within 100 metres I guess!

hmmm

congestion is going raise a big stink on that network... Will my toiletry needs be subjected to a fair use policy?

/coat

Hooray!

As someone who lives in one of the aforementioned places (Northampton - the country's biggest town, awaiting city status for the last three hundred years or so) I can't wait. We've been used as guinea pigs before, the Chip and PIN system was used in the town before the national rollout (and that was fun, working in retail at the time and explaining to EVERY SINGLE CUSTOMER what to do...)

Call me a cynic...

But once the Government kills P2P, are such bandwidth sizes really going to be used/necessary?

I'm the slime oozing out of your TV set.

There will be a shit-load of people worrying about it being unhygienic - "Internet through the sewers? what about the smell?"

LLU - Local Loo Unbundling?

Cable or Sewer providers? - I've fallen between two stools on this one.

Will my P.C. become infected or just covered in flies?

As this will be a 'virtual paper' environment will too many e-mails clog the system?

Will I need to get the new Norton Plunger to clean other parts of my system?

Are Dyno-Rod about to become an Independant Shit Provider?

Round these parts, most of the cable TV piping isn't used that much. It shouldn't be too great a task to go from main sewer to green box.

That's better, cleared a load off my mind.

Paris angle? - has anyone smelt Paris? (the city that is)

lol at Joke comments!

I couldn't stop laughing at some of the joke comments, LOL!!

Maybe fibre broadband networks will actually be a reality in years to come, probably not via the sewers tho.

South Korea already has 100Mb/sec broadband!

Re: why people need to download at a rate greater than 24 hours of TV per day

To Ian :

Remember that there tends to be more than one person in most houses. Imagine a family of four :

Kid 1 and Kid 2 in their bedrooms each watching a different live streaming HDTV channel. Kid 2 chatting to freind Belinda on VOIP about that eversohansom pop star she is watching. Kid 1 downloading the latest multi GB linux ISOs.

Parent 1 in the study working away on the net, watching streaming bloomberg TV or similar while using VOIP to make trades on some foreign stock market.

Parent 2 in the kitchen, streaming Delia/Jamie/Gordon in HD while making dinner and chatting to aunty over VOIP.

All while the internet connected fridge contacts Microsoft Update and downloads the latest patches for WindowsForIceMakersOS.

It all adds up bandwidth wise. And if history is anything to go by, the more we get, the more new and exciting uses we discover for it that we can't think of at the moment.

So there certainly is a use for that kind of bandwidth. Whether there is the central infrastructure to support it is, as you say, another question. My money is on the old "supply and demand" pony sorting that one out in time.

Hope this all doesn't put too much of a dent in your livelyhood ... might be time to consider a career change?

Hmmm

Surely this will just lead to more "backdoor" attacks.......

TAXI !!!

WIFFY NETWORK

This will trully be a wiffy network!

Hull is just waiting for this

Clearly the best place for installing this is Hull.

We have on supplier (Kingston Communications/Karoo/KCOM - yes they do suffer from an identity crisis) and no alternatives for phones, ADSL etc etc.

No cable, no sky broadband, nothing but KC.

So there is a clear case for competition and I wouldn't be surprised if half the city jumped ship to the new supplier.

IMHO clearly a better proposition than elsewhere in the country.

Only problem being due to the serious flooding this year I can see people objecting to cables being put in the sewers!