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Virgin trials fibre broadband over electrical poles

By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 27 Jul 2010 at 15:16

Virgin Media is rolling out superfast fibre broadband over electrical poles in a trial in a Welsh village.

Starting next month, residents of Crumlin, Carephilly will see speeds up to 50Mbits/sec, nearly ten times the current rate of their 5.2Mbits/sec copper ADSL service.

Virgin has previously tested running fibre networks over telegraph poles to access rural areas, but used their own bespoke infrastructure for the trial.

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This is the first time Virgin Media has worked with another firm, in this case Western Power Distribution's Surf Telecom, which has lines running to 2.6 million homes.

"This is a partnership with a company with existing commercial infrastructure," a Virgin spokeswoman said. "That's why we're quite excited."

Richard Doble, design and policy manager at Surf Telecoms, added: "The possibilities of aerial deployment promise a valuable use of existing infrastructure and an interesting new commercial opportunity for utility companies."

Encouraging innovative rollouts

The Government has called on ISPs to look for creative new ways to roll out faster broadband, as spending cuts mean less funding will come from the public purse. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt said earlier this year that utilities could be required to open up their infrastructure to help out ISPs.

Virgin said its trials would "help inform these discussions", and called for clearer regulation to make new broadband delivery methods easier to deploy.

It wants a clearer planning processes, access to BT's own poles and ducts, and a straightforward way to calculate wayleave payments - the amount landowners can charge for running cabling through the space over their land.

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User comments

With wired networking working at a gigabit through your electrical wiring at home using something like the Belkin Gigabitpo Werline adapters why couldnt they think along those type of things as there would be no major installation costs & instantly available to everyone? Just a thought?

By PLF_skydiver on 28 Jul 2010

The RF noise produced would be hideous.

By phantombudgie on 28 Jul 2010

Why would there be an RF noise problem? Its Fibre optics.

By mattcocker on 28 Jul 2010

Ahh, just realised thats a reply to the comment above

By mattcocker on 28 Jul 2010

So many possibilities

Just to expand on what was said above: Noise is the problem, which in telephone cables can be dealt with because they're made of a twisted pair of wires. It is possible for a network connection to be made over long distances using mains supply cables, but not at any great speed. I believe that electricity companies are already using the tech to talk to their latest generation meters. Now if someone could think about this in a more holistic way, you'd have every utility meter connected.

As for where to run cables, i'd say their are 2 main directions:
1). As has already been tested, utility companies are a good way to go. I'm not sure you'd need to make these companies open up their infrastructure. There's a definite positive business case for these kind of partnerships, as you can see from Virgin's example.
2). Cables are not everything. I'd be a lot happier to see the T-mobile network (used by Virgin) expanded to have perfect 3.5G signals absolutely every in the country. This would only require the one cable run to the mast, which i'm sure would be a cheaper first step. Okay, so wou won't be getting lightning fast speeds, but sat in my house i get better speeds now (from mobile internet) than i ever did from my ADSL connection. Now i have a 50Mbit/s connection and mobile internet, just in case one of them goes down, always connected.

By _Alex_ on 29 Jul 2010