Broadband speeds in the UK currently max out at about 300 Mbps, provided by British Telecom. Sky and TalkTalk have now announced that they intend to bring 1 Gbps speeds to UK cities. The roll-out will begin in York next year, before moving to other locations.
Working with CityFibre, Sky and TalkTalk have created a new company that will build the infrastructure for providing ultra-fast broadband. The new venture is aiming to create a "state of the art, city-wide, pure fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network." Once the network is built, Sky and TalkTalk will retail competing services over the infrastructure.
At 1 Gbps per second, the services will be significantly faster than the fastest fiber optic speeds available in the UK today and will match those offered by Google Fiber in the US. Sky says that the fiber optic roll-out in York will be the first time that ultra-fast broadband has been deployed in the UK on a city-wide basis. Fujitsu will be employed to deploy the network.
"This announcement makes York the digital infrastructure capital of the UK," said James Alexander, leader of the City of York council. "Gaining ultra fast broadband across the city is a huge boost for our economy, providing significant new opportunities for businesses based here and better quality and value to our residents."
The services are expected to go live in York from 2015, with a subsequent roll-out planned for two more, yet to be named, cities.
From that article they had a rollout cost of 330 million (USD) and service about 56,000 subs and just recently started to upgrade to support 1G speeds. The network has actually been in for a while and they are FTTH but their deployment cost from those numbers is $5,893 per subscriber.
From the telegraph article I found on this deployment they estimated £5m (about 7 million USD) for 20,000 subs which puts their deployment cost at about $350 USD per home.
Based on some numbers I saw published in the past when Verizon did Fios FTTH rollouts I thought they were over $4,000 per installed subscriber so the £5m estimated cost for this seems extremely low compared to the companies who have completed deployments.
I suppose the 5 mil figure us just for the FTTP portion and doesn't count the last leg of the solution that brings data from "premises" to "home".
These companies haven't got a clue. Why spend money on super speed in limited areas when the rest of the country is screaming out for a just a basic workable connection!
Paul
Well, in the wilds of rural Lancashire in the UK, a group of residents have got together and set up their own hyperfast 1 Gbs network, and it's available now.
http://b4rn.org.uk/
Check out the speeds they are getting on Youtube, just type "b4rn pat close" into the search box.
we can only wonder if we'll ever get to the average speeds they have in Seoul, let alone other wired-up places.