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

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

[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: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.