UK Completes 250km of Undersea Broadband Rollouts

DW100 writes The UK has completed a highly challenging rollout of broadband to remote islands in Scotland, covering 250km of seabed. The work has taken many months but will mean some 150,000 residents in the islands will be able to get broadband of up to 80Mbps. A cable laying ship, the Rene Descartes, carried out the work, with the longest cable stretching 50 miles between islands.

Comments

Da Fish Are Happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Now lets move on to the CHUDs.

GCHQ

[Anonymous Coward]

Brought t you by... GCHQ! It only takes a price mark-up of 100%, but hey, you've got a total backup of your data!

250 km

[Anonymous Coward]

Of undersea broadband to be tapped by the government and censored against dangerous cartoons of children and downloading linux distros from the pirate bay.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[ihtoit]

...and let's not start on mixing scales here... km to miles? Do I have to do EVERYTHING? Divide by 1.609.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

These are the Scottish islands we're talking about; where the weather can get so bad that even radio stays indoors.

Now a very quick way to find out

[Chrisq]

Now a very quick way to find out: What's the story at Balamory?

.. Wouldn't you like yo know?

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Richard_at_work]

You know what also happens a heck of a lot up there? Storms. And you know what storms can do? Degrade radio transmissions significantly.

And why would submarines be colliding with cables laid on the sea bed? That would require submarines to be dragging themselves across the sea bed - which they don't normally do...

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

These are the Scottish islands we're talking about; where the weather can get so bad that even radio stays indoors.

I hear that they are going top relay it to the more remote residents via bagpipes. The whole thing will use Scotland's major sustainable energy source, the virtually limitless supply of hot air from Alex Salmond

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also potentially much faster than any cable-based system

Wat?

Cable-based communication is potentially much faster than any radio based communication. Each signal pair in a cable can carry as much information that you can transfer over radio.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[ihtoit]

clearly, you have no idea what the German Navy's capable of.

Ask Norway.

Re: cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[garyok]

Wouldn't you need a 500m tall tower for LoS comms with an island 80km away? Good luck keeping that standing in an Atlantic gale.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no cable at Scapa Flow for this rollout. If you're worried about submarines, I'd be concerned about the cables around Arran and Bute, that's on the way to the submarine base at Faslane. Not that submarines tend to drag themselves along the bottom often enough to worry about the cables.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Shinobi]

Radio is slow compared to fibre, it's prone to disruptions from weather and EMI, and, it's actually quite expensive too, in a situation like this.

A cable laying ship, The Rene Descartes

[Anonymous Coward]

Give her the "D", indeed!

Better than the USA

[Roodvlees]

So now even remote scottish islanders have better internet than most of the US.
When will the US realize they have to regulate their internet market?
Will it be when Africa passes them in average internet connection?(every other populated continent has)
Will it be when other nations start to apply diplomatic pressure because they are slowing down the world as a whole?
Will it be when they end up as the nation in the world with the worst internet connection?

Re:Better than the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, all of that will be blamed on the dang Communists, African-Americans, Jews, Native Americans, Liberals, Atheist and Unions.

Really, you underestimate the capacity of the corporate noise machine to sell propaganda.

Re:Better than the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

You can not compare those 150,000 peoples to the over 3 million in the USA. While you're at it, lets just cherry pick 800,000 in Kansas using Google fiber and see if they are better off then the Scots.

Re:Better than the USA

[unixisc]

How is the US a country w/ the worst internet connection? At least the major cable guys offer unlimited data a month, and price you according to the speed that you wanna rent. Which sounds fair. One has to pay far more than that in other countries - not sure about Europe, but definitely it's far cheaper than Asia

Re:Better than the USA

[OzPeter]

How is the US a country w/ the worst internet connection?

NYC has a higher population density that Tokyo, but Tokyo has connection speeds that NY'ers only dream about.

While you can argue that out in the boondocks high speed internet is harder to do, what is happening in markets like NYC makes the US look like a joke in comparison with other countries with cities of a similar density.

Re:Better than the USA

[Trepidity]

At least the major cable guys offer unlimited data a month...

That's on its way out. Comcast recently started rolling out data caps in several major markets, and plans to expand them nationwide over the next five years. Time Warner will probably match them soon.

Re:Better than the USA

[dave420]

You can just look at the statistics. The US doesn't fare well in pretty much any class. Substandard service, exorbitant prices, poor coverage, and so on.

Re:Better than the USA

[Computershack]

At least the major cable guys offer unlimited data a month, and price you according to the speed that you wanna rent. Which sounds fair. One has to pay far more than that in other countries - not sure about Europe, but definitely it's far cheaper than Asia

I pay the equivalent of $50 a month for 80mbps down, 20mbps up with no data caps or throttling here in the UK.

Re:Better than the USA

[ThinkingGuy]

When will the US realize they have to regulate their internet market?

If the local government only allows one monopoly ISP in a given town, it's not really a "market," is it?

Re:Better than the USA

[unixisc]

Ain't that a given - as there are more consumers, the connections speeds would reduce due to the bandwidth being distributed b/w more people

Re:Better than the USA

[unixisc]

In that case, it would be accurate to say that the US will become worse than others. That's assuming that others have the things people in the US take for granted - like a 15Mbps with unlimited data for just $50/month (which is what I have w/ TWC)

Re:Better than the USA

[unixisc]

Something more than platitudes would be more appreciated. Like I get cable internet from TWC with a very good service, reasonably priced, and previously in CA, had the same experience w/ Comcast. If you think the prices are exorbitant, who are you comparing it with? Countries like Estonia & Finland, which have a far lower population density, or countries like China, Korea, Japan & India?

Re:Better than the USA

[xaxa]

While you can argue that out in the boondocks high speed internet is harder to do, what is happening in markets like NYC makes the US look like a joke in comparison with other countries with cities of a similar density.

The population density of the Outer Hebrides is 9/km^2, about the same as the Scottish Highlands. The Inner Hebrides have 4-5/km^2. I'm pretty sure that will be the least densely populated place in the whole UK.

(However, I live in an out-of-the-way bit of London, and get about 2Mbit/s. That's very unusual though, so unusual that I didn't think to check before renting there.)

Re: Better than the USA

[garyok]

Me too. Although it's not all roses. Page loads do seem to have gotten quite a bit slower since the ISP filters went in. And I'm fairly sure they've started banning sites before they get court orders. Other traffic seems unaffected though.

Re: Better than the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

I live 1km from a small town, about 40km from the nearest major populace. We pay £5 and month (about 8USD) for our broadband. It's about 16MBs and unlimited bandwidth and comes through the copper phone lines. The reason it's so cheap that even though it's a small town, there's at least 8 companies offering broadband so they have to compete. The problem with the U.S. is no competition.

Re:Better than the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

but but we are a bigger country than Scotland and our population density is much scarcer so it is harder for the magic hand to stretch so far.

Re:Better than the USA

[don.g]

I'm having trouble working out if you're being sarcastic or genuinely uninformed.

Re:Better than the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't read too much into this, the UK still has major broadband rollout problems, effectively you've got a few groups in the UK:

1) The inner city lot. These people normally get the best broadband first and foremost, the exceptions tend to be people stuck on cabinets that only serve a small amount of people- if you live in an area that has 1000 houses, and that maxes the capacity at the local cabinet, and some developer comes along and manages to squeeze 20 more houses or apartments into a small buildable gap in the area then BT may in the past have had to stick a whole new cabinet in for these people. With the fibre rollouts BT would deem that cabinet not economically viable such that all your neighbours will have fibre, but you'll be fucked.

2) The inbetweeners- people living in suburbia, or rural areas that are only a couple of 10s of miles from major population centres. These people tend to get fucked the most, because they're not a particular sob story, and they're not densely populated enough for BT to deem them economically viable. Some of these gaps have been filled by BDUK government funding in recent years but it's extremely patchy. I'm in this category, our whole village has fibre except the last 80 houses on our street. This is largely due to council ineptitude though and I understand they're going to rectify this soon by funding upgrade of our cabinet where they spent public subsidy paying BT to upgrade the other cabinets previously with far more houses on that were already economically viable (i.e. they gave BT free money for no real reason). I know many people in this situtation so it seem incredibly common for say, half a village to have fibre, and half not to.

3) The extreme sob stories. These are people that live on islands, or at the extremes of the UK in extremely low population density areas. These people get given government and EU funding like no tomorrow, those in the story above are a fine example.

So just because remote Scottish islanders have had 10s or hundreds of millions spent on getting them good broadband to service populations numbering in the mere thousands doesn't change the fact that there are many millions of people sometimes even living right in the middle of major population centres who are still getting fucked in the UK. They sit in a middle ground where they're not numerous enough for BT to judge them to be a priority in terms of private investment, and not enough of a sparsely populated sob-story for the government to give a shit about them either.

Part the problem is that BT and the government fiddle the numbers to sound good. They say that they're focussed on serving 95% of the population, but it seems that what they actually means is serving 95% of exchanges - there's still far far less than 95% of cabinet serviced which means they'll fall well short of actually serving 95% of the population when they're done.

I'm not being completely fair I guess, things have improved with BDUK funding in the last couple of years, but there's still a lot of work to be done, and it is galling when you see millions being spent on people numbering in the thousands yet similarly sized populations only need funding in the tens or hundreds of thousands for the same effect and don't get it. Even this isn't to say I don't support connecting those remote communities, I do, of course I do, but money definitely isn't prioritised for maximum benefit of the UK as a whole, it's prioritised towards what sounds good in the media. Judging by your reaction; "So now even remote scottish islanders have better internet than most of the US." it's had it's intended effect - it's made you believe the UK is a well oiled future friendly broadband machine. But that's not even close to the truth for millions of people.

Re:Better than the USA

[dave420]

They're hardly platitudes, and have been discussed to death. Feigning ignorance isn't really helping your position.

Re:Better than the USA

[Roodvlees]

So the problem is over regulation or just bad regulation? Maybe because it where big companies who brought this regulation into existence in the first place.

Re:Better than the USA

[Bengie]

A single $100/port fiber chassis has more bandwidth than all of the USA could use right now during peak hours, and that's divided among only 2500 users. Unless you're proposing 2500 home users need more than 4tb/s of bandwidth. For reference, Netflix is about 30% of peak USA traffic and is about 1tb/s.

Bandwidth density is not an issue unless you're using archaic copper.

Re:Better than the USA

[Neil Boekend]

But it is regulated. Just not in the way it should be.

Re:Better than the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a NYC apartment dweller myself, but my understanding is that you're at the mercy of the apartment owner/manager, who strike exclusive agreements with providers. I know people who are stuck w/ time warner and have absolutely no other alternatives. On has to assume there is some quid pro quo going on.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[jeffmeden]

It's also potentially much faster than any cable-based system

Wat?

Cable-based communication is potentially much faster than any radio based communication. Each signal pair in a cable can carry as much information that you can transfer over radio.

Station wagon full of LTO tapes, anyone?

Depends on what you mean by fast. The speed of light through air is quite a bit faster than through optical fiber or copper, thus yielding lower latency over distances. It's such a difference that the path from New York City to Chicago is now traversed by microwave/laser towers for financial institutions, in order to save a few milliseconds on the round trip and thus yield faster (read: more profitable) trades between the commodities market hub (in Chicago) and the securities market hub (in NYC).

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[morgauxo]

Umm, no.

The faster the connection the more bandwidth is needed. I suppose that technically there is more bandwidth available in all of the radio spectrum than you are likely to get through one cable. However.. radio has to be shared with every other radio user out there in the world. You don't get to use ALL of the available bandwidth available in the open air for just one thing. You pay some government regulator a ton of money and then you get a channel, a little slice of that bandwidth which you can use. Otherwise we would all try to have our own personal wireless broadband, immediately run out of bandwidth and nothing would work through the interference!

You do get to use all of the bandwidth available in a cable though and if it's a half-way decent cable that is a LOT. And.. if that isn't enough you can run another cable and use all of that bandwidth too.

Occasionaly we might see a situation where a typical wireless link than a wired one. If that happens it is only because money and time have recently been poured into developing modulation methods and protocols to more efficiently use bandwidth and it has been applied to the wireless connection first. When these new discoveries are applied to wired connections it all evens out and the wire is faster again.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[ihtoit]

uh, that's what spread spectrum's for.

Thank Hedy Lamarr for that.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[dave420]

That's HEDLEY!

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[unixisc]

So in UK, do mobile carriers like Vodafone offer unlimited data plans? Or conversely, do none of the broadband providers there provide unlimited data plans? This is only extravagant if people in Orkney & Shetland were getting uncapped data from the carriers. Is that the case here?

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[amalcolm]

one word - bandwidth

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Bengie]

New expensive hallow fiber is about 99.5%c, while regular fiber is about 65%c. I'll be happy with regular fiber for now, but once I get 1gb Internet on the cheap, the next upgrade will be hallow fiber trunks for low latency gaming. Regular fiber for the last mile will be fine.

Need to a way to spy on the outling islands...

[Anonymous Coward]

What better way to suck them into an internet addiction and then spy...

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean "hollow"?

Hallow fiber is what you'll have when the Vatican gets into the ISP business.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Computershack]

Radio is no use. You'd need to be on VHF at least in order to get the bandwidth for the speed and VHF and higher is line of sight. You'd need fooking tall towers at either end to overcome the curvature of the earth for that kind of distance between the UK and the islands. Not only that, it can be easily interrupted by both man made and naturally occurring sources.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[AmiMoJo]

Also, it's much easier to drive all traffic through a few cables where they can be easily tapped by GCHQ.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

There's this thing called RADIO, invented by a rather clever chap called MARCONI. It allows untethered communication between two points. It doesn't, therefore, rely on cables. It's also potentially much faster than any cable-based system and not prone to submarines colliding with it. Which happens a LOT up Scapa way.

Uhh. While it is true that radio has an edge when it comes to propagation delay compared to fibre, it's not enough to bother any but the staunchest algorithmic trader. When it comes to bandwidth it's not even close, the fibre wins by so much it's not even funny, and that's comparing to microwave, i.e. line of sight radio links, which are difficult to span large stretches of water with, being line of sight. Also since sea water is conductive you have a dickens of a time to deal with all the reflections and other potential signal degradation.

If you want to communicate via radio and it's not line of sight, then the only viable option if you're going to have any kind of bandwidth is satellite. That's both slower and suffers from a much longer delay. Any other radio is going to be much lower frequency (to follow the earth's curvature), and hence severely bandwidth limited.

P.S. Submarines will not cut cables laying on the bottom of the ocean if that's not specifically in their orders to do so. They a) don't spend much time dragging along the ocean floor, and b) have much better charts than you and I (since they also cover military cables and installations) so, that's be the very least of your worries.

Units?

[alleycat0]

250 km of seabed, with 50 miles between islands...i suppose consistency of units would be a lot to ask for...

Re:Units?

[jittles]

250 km of seabed, with 50 miles between islands...i suppose consistency of units would be a lot to ask for...

The Brits are confused about units. They can't decide whether to use SI, Imperial, or Ancient Hebrew measurements. Just be thankful they didn't measure the distance in palms or spans.

Re:Units?

[Spottywot]

250 km of seabed, with 50 miles between islands...i suppose consistency of units would be a lot to ask for...

The Brits are confused about units. They can't decide whether to use SI, Imperial, or Ancient Hebrew measurements. Just be thankful they didn't measure the distance in palms or spans.

Agree, submitter is inconsistent with units, mixing them in the same sentence is pretty lax. As for confused, I'm not so sure. In everyday life we seem to be able to mix and match units fairly easily, weight is stones and pounds by default, height is in feet and inches, yet somehow I know my metric measures too. None of it really matters as long as we consistantly use metric for science and engineering.

Re:Units?

[Xest]

It's probably because it's a French company doing a rollout in British territory. The French sources will quote km, the British will quote miles.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Shinobi]

Right, as if that's any harder with a radiolink... Quite a stupid statement

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Bengie]

For the prices you pay, they have been blessed :-)

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[jittles]

There's this thing called RADIO, invented by a rather clever chap called MARCONI. It allows untethered communication between two points. It doesn't, therefore, rely on cables. It's also potentially much faster than any cable-based system and not prone to submarines colliding with it. Which happens a LOT up Scapa way.

Sounds like those sub captains need more training... The sub should never touch the floor.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[suutar]

Yeah, but what securities trader worth their salt is going to be on a Scottish island more than 50 miles from anywhere instead of in London?

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

He dead.

She dead.

Next?

Undersea broadband?

[Macman408]

I guess this undersea broadband deployment means that a certain sea sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea can finally get broadband!

I wonder if this means that the Krusty Krab will start offering free Wi-Fi?

Re:Undersea broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Krusty Krab
>free

Pick one.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the flying fuck is a space nutter, and why do you seem to be so obsessed with them (assuming you're the same AC that's been whinging about them these last several days)?

Radio

[Anonymous Coward]

Could've done it cheaper with radios. These islands aren't that far from the mainlaind. The weather in Scotland isn't as extreme as some people make it out to be. Certainly not as extreme as it is here in the tropics, and we have no problem using radios despite all kinds of electrical storms.

Re:Radio

[Anonymous Coward]

I really do have to disagree with you about the weather.
31st Dec 1999. We finally had a break in the weather. The previous 3 days we'd experienced 60-100mph winds and rain coming at us horizontally. Two of the westerly facing windows in the house blew in. Power went out on the 30th. That was restored on the 3rd Jan.

All happened on the west side of the Isle of Barra.

When the weather on the Islands is good, it is the best place in the world. Sadly far too often, the weather is total shite. Wind and rain for days on end.
I moved away in 2003 but I miss the place even though I was there for only 5 years.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

As good as unlimited.
My Brother-in-Law lives on the delightful Isle of Skye, not far from Dunvegan Castle. He gets 250Gb download broadband from the FTTC link he uses.
The Fibre runs as far as a Boxc abot 50m from his front gate. Far better than what he used to get on the Mainland in Stirling.

Re: cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[garyok]

Or 125m towers on each side. That's a bit more doable. But... then there's a chance an Islander will climb Satan's ladder and glimpse the beguiling lights of civilisation. Won't end well.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[ihtoit]

that's "Hedy", actually. As in Hedwig Eva Maria Lamarr.

Re:cable?? Bit extravagant, aren't we?

[ihtoit]

Hutchison 3G ("Three UK") offer unlimited data on their pay as you go and basic voice contract packages.