UK ISP Hyperoptic Touts Hyperfast 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Boat Broadband

Pure fibre optic ISP Hyperoptic has announced that their 1000Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP/B) network has just reached residential boats in London’s South Dock marina (including South Dock and Greenland Dock), which we guess makes it a “Fibre-to-the-Boat” service. Ho ho.

Apparently there are 150 berths in the South Dock, with 50 berths in the Greenland Dock, and so far over 50% of residents have already ordered the service. Well you can hardly blame them because prior to today they had to rely on basic 3G based Mobile Broadband connections.

Patrick Keating, Harbour Master for Southwark Council, said:

“It was fantastic to be able to address the residents’ broadband issues with such an outstanding solution. It’s an issue that I have been investigating for a while; I never envisaged a jump from nothing to a gigabit. The residents are thrilled.”

Stephen Waddington, Resident of Greenland Dock, added:

“Mobile signals are flaky on a steel hulled Dutch barge and teens quickly exhaust data plans. The dock is on the opposite side of the river for Canary Wharf but lacked its data infrastructure. Having a high-speed fibre solution to the pontoon means we have better broadband than a lot of people in the UK have in their houses.”

Hyperoptic, in bringing its service to the Marina, installed their fibre optic lines directly into the communications hub of each marina and then connected each residential boat via CAT5e cabling. It’s quite normal for mains electricity cables to be run into residential boats, so we imagine they just carried the Ethernet cable in the same way.