Full Fibre Expansion for London Boroughs of Wandsworth, Merton and Richmond
A new project has claimed that “residents and businesses” across the London UK boroughs of Wandsworth, Richmond upon Thames and Merton will benefit from the rollout of a new full fibre broadband and Ethernet network, which is being supported by Boldyn Networks, the Greater London Authority (GLA) and Transport for London (TfL).
The project, which forms part of the Mayor of London’s long-running Connected London programme (here), will see a new “high speed” fibre optic network being deployed to connect 105 public sector buildings across the three boroughs.
The work is expected to improve council services and boost connectivity to council housing, community centres and youth clubs. Residents will also benefit from faster connectivity within a range of public buildings, including local libraries and leisure centres. Not to mention upgrades to the image quality and reliability of 57 CCTV cameras, which will allow the footage to be accepted as evidence in court.
Advertisement
Funding for the project appears to have come from a grant under the UK Government’s wider £900m Getting Building Fund (here). As we recall, the Mayor of London was allocated £22.1m from the Getting Building Fund in 2020 for a wide-ranging package of projects.
Billy D’Arcy, CEO of UK & Ireland at Boldyn Networks, said:
“We’re proud to be supporting the drive for better connectivity across the capital. Reliable connectivity creates many benefits for residents and businesses. From upgrading connectivity, improving access to education resources, and boosting safety across the boroughs, high-speed digital infrastructure will help to transform communities across the city.”
Theo Blackwell, Chief Digital Officer for London, said:
“The introduction of the new fibre network across Wandsworth, Richmond and Merton will improve public safety and connectivity and lay the foundations to positively transform local services in the future across the boroughs. Making sure that every borough in London has access to robust and reliable digital infrastructure is crucial to the Mayor’s commitment to making the capital a better, safer and more prosperous city for all.”
The new project follows the installation of another fibre network in the boroughs of Sutton and Kingston upon Thames. These fibre networks are intended to complement Boldyn Network’s existing 20-year concession with TfL to deliver a backbone of fibre connectivity across the capital and high-speed 4G and 5G mobile connectivity across the London Underground.
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 Linkedin.
Latest UK ISP News
- FTTP (5904)
- BT (3615)
- Politics (2677)
- Business (2392)
- Openreach (2382)
- Building Digital UK (2311)
- Mobile Broadband (2099)
- FTTC (2073)
- Statistics (1870)
- 4G (1771)
- Virgin Media (1720)
- Ofcom Regulation (1552)
- Fibre Optic (1452)
- Wireless Internet (1444)
- FTTH (1384)
London is already the city with the highest amount of CCTVs per capita in the world, even more than police state china and they just can’t help but keep deploying even more. Coupled with the fact that the police cant catch the acid attacker using all this CCTV and that the police will tell you they do not have resources to check the CCTV when a crime is committed under one just shows how much of a colossal waste of taxpayer money this is
The question is: will people finally wake up and boot this clown mayor out? Stay tuned for the next episode
Given that China has a population of over 1.2bn, it will always have a low per capita value for pretty much every metric that you can think of.
With that population being spread out over a vastly larger area, greater proportionally than the difference in population versus London, even if China matched the per capita value of London you’d still see significantly more cameras in London. That’s just how big cities are.
Now if you compared London with Beijing, no doubt the opposite would be true.
All these false comparisons that people make are tiresome.
It is not a false comparison, it is a fact
In the ENTIRE WORLD, London is the ONLY city outside China to get into the most surveilled cities
https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-08-14/the-top-10-most-surveilled-cities-in-the-world
London is MORE surveilled than Beijing, again the capital of a literal police state
It is very clear that all these cameras are not to fight against crime. The met did not use them in all the crimes my neighbours have suffered, instead the met goes on X and crowdsources people to find their criminals. The CCTVs are there to fight lawful citizens like the ones fighting against Khans car taxes
More up to date, and completely different, numbers as they deal with public rather than including private cameras: https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/
Not quite as striking as the 2020 news article and easily available by clicking the link in that story.
London is nowhere near the public cameras in Chinese cities. It’s not great but it’s nowhere near the level of state surveillance in China’s urban areas.
Canary Wharf for instance is crawling with CCTV but is also private property as is the footage those cameras record. China I imagine pretty much every camera is the CCP’s and they’ve easy access to the rest.
Important distinction when making claims like that London is more heavily surveilled than Beijing. Unless you’re claiming that the private cameras belonging to businesses and citizens included in the 2020 report are also being used by Khan and others as part of that apparatus.
And the statistics under the previous mayor?
But sure, pick on this one for some reason.
Other than the comments above, I’d be interested to know why Mark Jackson has selected an image of Hong Kong to illustrate London.
I KNOW RIGHT!
Should have been a picture of Ambleside
Is there any more information about how this will benefit residents rather than just connecting all the council buildings together?
Or how Sutton and Kingston upon Thames residents benefited?
As I don’t imagine it will really be used by FTTP providers
From my understanding the company is from America, why can’t the government give British company a share in the project.
HMG gave a contract to Americans?!
I guess Infosys were busy.
Good question, especially when these councils already work with providers anyway. Community Fibre already covers most of their housing stock, no reason why they couldn’t just get another connection from them
Surely this area would be covered commercially. Why spend a lot of taxpayers money on it
Because it benefits no one except the authoritarians like Khan
It is *exactly* a commercial project. Local Government has decided it wants high speed connections to their offices, so they have bought commercial leased lines to them. End of story.
(Except to observe that these deals agreed by government often have ludicrously long contract periods, that no business customer would ever agree to)
More local council connectivity = more problems detected, more quickly . . . sounds to me as if this could involve more expenditure . . . . but councils, we are told, are strapped for cash (Though Yuppyville may be an exception) . . . . in the absence of the review by AI of collected images and other info, does that mean the inception of a new recruitment campaign for vision impaired council officers ?
We must have equality in our “Stiff ignoring”