News - One gigabit per second UK broadband offered by Hyperoptic

[HEXUS]

Fibre optic broadband start-up company aims to leapfrog established players.

Read more.

[jim]

Gigler have been doing it for a while in Bournemouth, but as with all of these services I'm not convinced they've got a hope in hell of actually making any appreciable difference. Sure, it's great if you're one of the chosen few, but I doubt they're ever going to compete with any of the big players. In other words, by the time they've got a Gigabit pipe to wherever I'm living, I'm confident BT or Virgin will have beaten them to it.

[KrisWragg]

If you don't need a phone line, which I assume you won't, then this isn't actually all that bad.

BT Infinity is roughly £25 + £15 line rental for 80Mbit. But most people don't even use their phones anyway.

[Runner1409]

THAT IS SWEET!!! currently in Romania we have 100mbps for around 10 Euros

[mojothejester]

It'll be good news for people getting a ps4. The ps4 will play movies at 4k resolution, which will have to be downloaded, so 1G service would be very useful. Not for most people yet, but when the time comes, we'll need faster than that too...

[dcwt2010]

This is brilliant, when can we have it in the towns and villages? Next century perhaps or am I being optimistic?

I'm all for progress but this digital divide is only going to get worse and worse.

[jnutt]

I recon by the time this gets to the small villages Hell will have frozen over and thawed out again.

[NortyOne]

I'm feeling we should start a petition to get them to branch out, maybe push to shift some of that government funding onto projects like this instead of the usual money grabbers. Virgin media etc. wont ever bother to even come anywhere near this, why bother when you can have a £40+ contract providing 10% of the possible service. They cant manage a stable 30mb connection where i am, so we all should really be sacking off these jerks who just want to swim around in their pools of cash.......

meanwhile in the real world......ya realise this aint gunna happen, and that technically the infrastructures just wont support this in most cities / towns. nice to see someone trying to push the envelope though, kudos.

[kingpotnoodle]

This is brilliant, when can we have it in the towns and villages? Next century perhaps or am I being optimistic?

I'm all for progress but this digital divide is only going to get worse and worse.

When someone invents robotic deep bore tunnelling robots that can autonomously lay a fibre cable cheaply overnight to outside your front door without hoards of overpaid, incompetent and under-motivated squishy-flesh-bags being involved. Next day a more personable droid knocks your door, drills through your wall and installs your box...

More likely though is that before that happens someone will develop a wireless technology that means Future-BT only need to install the cables to a box on a tower which can serve several square kilometres with cheap if not amazing latency connectivity. Rather like LTE, but better enough to replace fixed line at comparable cost and ability. I'm fairly sure wireless will eventually replace wired for general consumers, once the cost/speed balance is right and comms tech outpaces increasing bandwidth requirements from new content. Probably a long way off though but in theory wireless is a lot better and more scalable than the mammoth task of digging up roads every few years to upgrade the cables.

[Top_gun]

This is old news as Hyperoptics have been offering this service for at least a couple of years. Come on Telegraph, keep up.

[Zerox]

For those interested.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/...eek-hyperoptic
http://www.telegeography.com/product...1gbps-service/

(tbh you are a little late Hexus)

Also for kicks I tried to see how far they actually cover.

Despite the above article saying that they are increasing their coverage in London the residents of No. 10 Downing Street & Buckingham Palace are not currently able to experience 1 GBps download speeds.

Her Majesty will be most disappointed indeed.

[McEwin]

I hate how when you test to see if you are in the right area it tells me to register my interest. I guess that means I'm not covered...

[badass]

When someone invents robotic deep bore tunnelling robots that can autonomously lay a fibre cable cheaply overnight to outside your front door without hoards of overpaid, incompetent and under-motivated squishy-flesh-bags being involved. Next day a more personable droid knocks your door, drills through your wall and installs your box...

More likely though is that before that happens someone will develop a wireless technology that means Future-BT only need to install the cables to a box on a tower which can serve several square kilometres with cheap if not amazing latency connectivity. Rather like LTE, but better enough to replace fixed line at comparable cost and ability. I'm fairly sure wireless will eventually replace wired for general consumers, once the cost/speed balance is right and comms tech outpaces increasing bandwidth requirements from new content. Probably a long way off though but in theory wireless is a lot better and more scalable than the mammoth task of digging up roads every few years to upgrade the cables.

The problem being that we're already near the limits of wireless. i.e. no amount of technology can make it much faster than it is now. Only by increasing the bandwidth (of the spectrum, which is limited) will we see much more than incremental increases over 4g.
Fibre on the other hand using old single mode cable has demonstrated terabits over thousands of km.
IIRC the current record is 2 Terabits over 2000 km

On the deep bore tunneling robots, BT have a tunneling robot already called the mole. IIRC it pulls cables as well.

[Jay]

I live in the sticks in the N/W of the UK, BT aren't expecting to even start here until the end of next year so I have 0 chance. Still registered my interest though!

[Spud1]

The problem being that we're already near the limits of wireless.

The limit of our current technology and knowledge yes - but that doesn't mean that an alternative isn't round the corner.

In any case - you can already get point-to-point wireless connectivity faster than gigabit. Its generally used as a leased line replacement for building to building connections, and it's very very expensive, but still, you can do it.

I tend to agree that cabled connections are unlikely to be the future due to the cost of laying the cable. Either way for now, a service like hyperoptic or any of the many other providers around the country is still pretty cool if you are one of the lucky ones.

[MercutioUK]

This is brilliant, when can we have it in the towns and villages? Next century perhaps or am I being optimistic?

I'm all for progress but this digital divide is only going to get worse and worse.

Peace and quiet, lower crime and less pollution in the cities. I'm all for this lower crime, noiseless "green" initiative but it seems to be leaving busy urban centres behind.