A new civil engineering method has been developed called ‘Just Chuck it on the Surface’ (JCoS), which looks set to replace modern approaches by making it both massively faster and cheaper to deploy new Gigabit capable fibre optic broadband networks, with only minimal effort required.
“I can’t believe we never thought of doing this before! All these years we’ve just been digging the fibre underground with expensive equipment or laying cable along the tops of telegraph poles, when we could have simply thrown it on the ground with our bare hands instead!,” said Bob Builder, CEO of Fast Access Infrastructure Lan.
The new civil engineering solution, which appears to have borrowed some of its innovations from telecoms operators in a number of “developing countries“, does not require any expensive civil engineering equipment except for something to help splice the cable and hold the fibre drum. Estimates indicate that by using this method it could take as little as 10 minutes to fibre-up an entire street with access to Gigabit speeds.
The solution relies almost entirely on man power to grab the cable, roll it out a bit, break for a cuppa and then splice in a few connections. After that the fibre is simply left on the ground and if any breakages occur then a dedicated team of engineers is quickly dispatched to fix it. Crucially Bob recognises that network outages may become more common with this approach but he has a solution for that too.
As Bob explains, “Obviously the movement of cars, people, animals, weather and plants could present a few challenges to our deployment method but the good thing about JCoS is that you can easily build-in redundancy. Our plan is to simply add more cables so that every home is connected by at least four to ten different and separate optical fibres, secured with duct tape, thus if one breaks then we still have plenty of backups.”
However JCoS has faced some criticism from the government’s currently understaffed Department for Health and Common Sense (DHCS), which is concerned about the sheer number of cables that could end up peppering communities across the UK and obstructing pavements, as well as roads. Luckily Bob has an answer for that too and he suggests, in areas where such a concern exists, that the cables could simply be covered by new soil from local gardens.
The UK government is already understood to be considering several trials. Further details can be found here.
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April Fools! Obviously..
Litty April Fools prank
April Fools’ day…
April Fools !
April fools
Love the Rick rolling.
the scary thing is people think it that easy when its not 1st April
You can tell this is April Fool. There is no mention of Duct Tape. Any serious contractor would hold the cables down with some duct tape to stop people tripping over the cable.
You’re quite right, corrected to add the words “secured with duct tape” 🙂 .
April Fool, lol
Lol class
Mark don’t give Telcos ideas!
Virgin Media have been using this method for years #oldnews
Fantastic. Love the Rick-Roll at the end!
Department for health and Common Sense LOL then it hit me…Nice one!
Andy
Round my way, Openreach has been just chucking copper on the surface for years. My phone cable is buried, it is literally just thrown into the roadside and has been for many years!
*is not buried*
Yes we have “self burying cables” near Stoneahven. They just lie on the ground at the roadside where there is no ducting or telegraph poles.
Self burying in parts! I’ve even them left lying on the ground over entrance to fields for months on end leaving the farmers no choice but to drive over them for access pressing them into the ground. It is no surprise we often see the Openreach vans fault finding on the cables due to problems at the houses fed by them. If Openreach took a holistic approach to fixing them properly once rather than patching them up every year they would save themselves a lot of time and effort!
save us a lot of money, we have 10 Kms of trenching to do this year lol
You joke but in a recent trip to Bangalore for work purposes. I did see an awful lot of fibre strung across the trees overhanging the pavements. The pavements had been dug up for the civil works being done as part of the metro system installation linking the cities tech hubs together.
Funnily enough Zak that was one of my influences for the story above 🙂 , albeit perhaps more influenced by the crazy telecoms and electrical cabling in parts of India and the Philippines. They’re comically crazy and cross-talk must be a nightmare.
You nearlly caught me on your april fool I wish it was true though,. would’nt that be nice
It is a common sight to see telephone cables running over the fells, in the hedges and left exposed for years until the grass roots grow over them. Nothing new about surface installs with openreach.
I’d take FTTP through my letterbox if it ever gets to where I live!
> I’d take FTTP through my letterbox if it ever gets to where I live!
There’s an easier way to get fibre into your house:
https://archive.google.com/tisp/
@NE555 I signed up for that service when it came out.
Unfortunately I had to disconnect it all and return it, I could never get it to work, it turned out to be a right pain in the arse.
I almost fell for that. Brilliant
They’re missing the obvious openreach method, used with copper, of cable tied to dry stone walls. That can also be used with the ‘just chuck it in the ditch’ method at the sides of roads.
Hasn’t mega dirty being doing this recently in Devon
Actually it is not going to be a good or exciting idea anyway. I’d rather have a slower Fibre Optic deployment but a safer one than having cables laying on the floor.
In India and Bangladesh there have been reports of telephone and fibre cable vandalism (at night time) where gangs either steal the cables or deliberately damage them since many of these cables are left on the ground. The governments don’t have the money to dig the ground and then fix them again. Customers are then left with an internet outage for several hours before they get repaired again.
Maybe in a more remote rural area this might work where there are few villagers which you can trust. But the risk of having a truck, car, bus, etc crash over the cables is still high even if there is no deliberate malice involved.
It’s not just India and Bangladesh, metal theft has been taking place in the UK for years. There are cases of parts of motorways without lights due to cable theft. I also recall an occasion a few years ago when, on turning up at Bounds Green Tube station, I found it closed as rails had been stolen overnight.