Luxury London Apartments Get Full Fibre 10Gbps Home Broadband

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 🙁 .