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Luxury London Apartments Get Full Fibre 10Gbps Home Broadband

Sunday, May 26th, 2019 (12:01 am) - Score 7,445

How about this for a little taste of the future. Residents moving into the new The Stratford (Manhattan Loft Gardens) skyscraper in London, which overlooks the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, will soon become some of the first in the UK to access a 10Gbps home broadband connection via a new Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) service.

At 42 storeys tall the building (469 feet high) features 248 apartments and 146 hotel rooms, although you’ll need deep pockets since the cheapest flats have been selling off-plan for £500,000 and a penthouse will set you back £10 million. Bargain 😉 . All flats have floor-to-ceiling glass walls somewhere, and as they get bigger they also get more glamorous.

The good news, if you can afford one of their flats, is that you’ll also be able to enjoy a choice of unlimited broadband speeds from 100Mbps for £30 per month to 1Gbps for £59 and then the top package will give you 10Gbps at £199. Granted that last option might seem like a lot of money but for a 10Gbps package in a domestic environment it really isn’t.

Not that anybody needs or could fully use a 10Gbps package, but if you’ve got a few mill to throw on a luxury apartment then who cares about the little details, such as practical usability. Granted we’ve seen ISPs touting similar speeds before, such as Hyperoptic’s 10Gbps service (here), but those were all trials and this is a real commercial product.

The service itself is being delivered by a little known ISP called Black Fibre, which is another off-shoot from Telcom (like Velocity Fibre that serves the same sort of multi-dwelling unit (MDU) market). Customers are being offered a “business grade home internet with built in backup … firewall … round the clock support” and “no long-term contracts.

The service itself hasn’t been officially announced yet and we picked up on it while running one of our usual ISP database sweeps. Now back to a somewhat slower 59Mbps FTTC line, hurray 🙁 .

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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24 Responses
  1. Avatar photo Herve Shango says:

    I’m even lucky mine is provided by VM (I know they have their moments, but still) at least my isp isn’t TalkTalk lol, but damn the rich elite in London have to damn good lol.

  2. Avatar photo Joe says:

    ” Manhattan Loft Gardens”

    Seriously in London. Which PR bod came up with this nonsense. What next Eiffel Tower View.

    1. Avatar photo Ok says:

      We are waiting for Tramp Tower and Putin Plaza. It will be cheaper than a nuclear deterrent.
      There is more full fibre in rural Wales, Cornwall, and Northern Ireland that there is the big smog.

  3. Avatar photo chris conder says:

    B4RN can supply (and have done) a 10 gig feed to any of our customers if they want it.
    Most find 1 gig is sufficient. 😉
    It isn’t rocket science, it’s only changing a few lights at each end. This is what you can do if you do proper fibre to the home.

    1. Avatar photo Fastman says:

      so how far do you have to backhaul that from and I assume its more than the figures quoted above top package will give you 10Gbps at £199 per.

      Provide will provide what people are willing to pay for

      you could have an uncontended 1G months with 24x7x365 cover but you might not want to pay for it

    2. Avatar photo CarlT says:

      Just need to get people to not use shonky kit on their local network slowing that gigabit down to an average lower than VM’s 350 and all set.

    3. Avatar photo CarlT says:

      @Fastman the B4RN network is very, very simple and scalable as far as bandwidth goes. It’s better considered a MAN rather than a WAN.

      They aren’t hamstrung as BT Wholesale are by being forced to use Openreach for backhaul and as BT Retail are in being forced to use BT Wholesale.

      They also don’t have ECI headends / OLTs / L2S with 2.4Gb ports facing end users and only 1Gb ports for backhaul…

      The actual amount of backhaul doesn’t really matter as long as it never has visible contention. The usual formula for this is to take the average peak usage on the segment and add the maximum burst speed a single user can reach and that’s where your capacity needs to be.

      A caveat is that it’s almost certainly unwise to sell >=50% of a single backhaul or, if the access network segment is shared, that component to one customer, so in the case of Openreach that restricts the customers on the ECI garbage to 330Mb despite being on GPON.

      Part of the reason B4RN and others can offer value is following this model rather than having insanely high CIRs as standard.

    4. Avatar photo Fastman says:

      CARLT

      may be but its certainly more challenging than

      It isn’t rocket science, it’s only changing a few lights at each end. This is what you can do if you do proper fibre to the home.

    5. Avatar photo CarlT says:

      Indeed it is more challenging though for these guys it’s a case of adding another 10G to the LAGs connecting the switch the customer connects via to the rest of the network.

      For B4RN upgrading connectivity is actually no more complex than ordering a new 10G CableLink from Openreach would be with the added bonus that they can aggregate ports together rather than locking customers to a single port.

      Until such a point as they run out of fibre or capacity on their DWDM it is pretty much changing optics, adding SFPs and lighting new fibres.

      For others to offer 1G requires a chassis replacement and reprovisioning of all VLANs, SVLAN and CVLAN alike, alongside all the GigE and GPON ports on about 1/4th of their NGA real estate which is unfortunate.

  4. Avatar photo Fastman says:

    sorry uncontended 10Gig that should read

  5. Avatar photo Mark says:

    Not a bad price for 1GBPS, don’t know what I’d do with 10GBPS!

  6. Avatar photo Roger_Gooner says:

    Stuff the 10Gbps home broadband, I’m not buying an apartment where I can’t get Sky Sports.

  7. Avatar photo A_Builder says:

    Fastman

    I’d agree with you that there is a tiny bit more to provisioning services than changing the Christmas tree lights.

    That being said I think the thread is conflating 10G leaded with 10G best effort.

    TBH don’t think most users could tell the difference between 1G and 10G mostly down to the absence of a 10G port on most kit. Granted most high end kit does now sport 10G Ethernet sockets so that won’t be a barrier before long.

    It does rather show how FTTC is being left in the dust. Too many people shouting for too long “who needs more than 80/20” kind of gave OR the backstory to not do much. Anyway all changing – another block lost to OR for good.

    1. Avatar photo A_Builder says:

      Should have read

      “That being said I think the thread is conflating 10G leased with 10G best effort.”

    2. Avatar photo CarlT says:

      Going by the rules Openreach have they’d nail up 3.3Gb/s on an XGPON split for a 10G customer so there isn’t that much difference there from their POV.

  8. Avatar photo Marty says:

    I’m so happy with my 70meg which I use all the time Up to 11.5tb of data usage combined a month. Which is a lot more than these bugger’s will ever use in there penthouse I’d stand at the front door and break into song I’ve got 70meg. I’ve got 70meg. Which I use more than you. and I pay less than you do. I’ve got 70meg.

    1. Avatar photo Neb says:

      Interesting… anyone got any I’ve got 1Gig songs?

    2. Avatar photo CarlT says:

      I imagine they’d just look at you with sympathy then ask the security guard to escort you out of the building, the amount of content a person consumes, or doesn’t consume at those numbers, via the Internet not really being a measure of worth in any way, shape or form.

  9. Avatar photo marcin says:

    Money talk, i live in housing estate where i have 1mb , openreach had project to upgrade my estate to fttc even they have put up all the cabling ,now they have give up on us why ? Maybe because we are poor people and open reach is agter money.

    1. Avatar photo CarlT says:

      Openreach are indeed after money – they’re a privately held business after all. Not that this story is anything to do with them.

    2. Avatar photo j0hn says:

      I don’t get that comment at all.

      OpenReach charge the same wether you are rich or poor.

      All the urban council estates in my area have FTTC, with some (very little) FTTP.

      Most of the private new builds further out were copper only sites with 2-3Mb ADSL.

      It’s only very recent developments that have FTTP and that’s nothing to do with how wealthy the residents are.
      OpenReach install FTTP for free to all new build sites with 30 or more homes, even council estates.

      I just don’t think OpenReach care if an area is rich or poor. They charge everyone the same price.

      Your area will have been skipped due to the cost to reach you, not how much money you have in the bank.

    3. Avatar photo Rahul says:

      @j0hn: They do care because it is about a return on investment.
      If that wasn’t the case, how do you explain that Hyperoptic, CommunityFibre, etc have a registering interest for their building properties?

      Hyperoptic aren’t just going to install their service even if wayleave passes. This is why they want registering interests in order to be certain that the residents of that block will really, genuinely be interested in signing up to their service.

      They have to also assess the demographics of whether there are elderly or younger people, can they financially afford a service. If you’ve got an elderly care home or an area where people are financially poor and can’t afford to pay for a Fibre service, how do you expect a company to invest in that area?

      To new developments Openreach will naturally install the service for free simply because they haven’t got copper there in the first place! The labour cost will be of similar equivalence to that of them laying copper cables. They will have to lay cables anyway, so the natural rationality will of-course be to choose Fibre.

      This will mean that the customers have no choice to choose a cheaper ADSL package and are forced to sign up to an FTTP package.

      Not to mention the people affording those luxury new homes are prosperous people even if they rent out that property they are finding rich people who can afford to pay that kind of money.

      Here’s the thing, if you’ve got an existing block of flats or houses with copper already and you install Fibre the person might just say that “I am an old man/woman and am happy with basic Copper broadband, I won’t need to sign up to Fibre as I don’t use heavy tasking such as streaming videos or downloading games.”

      The price packages may be charged the same but the affordability is not the same. I can afford £30 or £50 for a Fibre package but a lower income person probably can’t afford more than £20 a month and these customers will want to stick to ADSL or maybe FTTC. But most FTTP packages if at all via Openreach network aren’t £20 a month they cost much more than the altnet providers.

    4. Avatar photo Fastman says:

      Rahul

      the fundamental think on your block of flats is your managing agent wont sign a wayealve for your building for your preferred provider

      Your area will have been skipped due to the cost to reach you, not how much money you have in the bank.

      wats of time provider building a network if it cannot deploy in the building

      I really do wonder if you grump as much to hyperoptic and your managing agent as you about openreach (which is not even deploying your building — and even it did your road you would not get any benefit of it !!! 0 due to the wayl;eave issue

      hilarious

  10. Avatar photo Chris says:

    I live in rural Bucks in a semi detached cottage but have 10G broadband!

Comments are closed

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