Tech For Life

…or at least the cables will, as one company is currently busy pushing fibre optic cable through Britains sewers. H2O has been rolling out (literally) its FOCUS (Fibre Optic Cable Underground Sewer!) since 2003 and with luck it is going to help stave off the broadband crunch that I, and a lot of other net users are expecting over the next 10 years or so. Very little messes up your life online than a slow connection.

The current network, based largely on copper cables carrying ADSL signals just can’t keep up with the 21st century demand for increasingly quick internet connections. As more and more of us cram onto this glowing spiders web, it just gets slower, and slower, and slower…and slower. Some observers are predicting that some areas of the country could be back to dial up speeds by about 2012. This is blatantly rediculous, how on earth can one of the most advanced countries in the world be grinding to a halt in this way?!

That’s a subject for another post, for now, back to the sewers!

I think this is a brilliant idea. No need for digging up roads, which is the main problem with expanding the existing network. Let’s face it, the UK’s roads are in a bad enough state without hacking them to bits in the quest for faster connections. Speeding up the superhighway at the expense of the ACTUAL highway, so to speak. Pushing the cables through the large tunnels that we have as sewers means that all you have to do is lift a manhole, poke it through, and off you go. Of course there is more to it than that, the cable needs to be very resistant to all sorts of gases and erm…effluent, and I for one wouldn’t want to be on the ‘poking through the sewer’ team.

So it’s quick, it’s easy, it’s cheap(er), and with 360,000 miles of sewer in the UK, there is no reason why this method can’t go a long way to preventing our slide back to the information superslow-way.