Fibre optic cables coming to a footpath near you?

We moved to our current place in July '21 - were advised our new estimated speed was "point one meg" I thought I heard 1Mb and spat my tea out "one megabit per second?!" - "no POINT one"

I got to cancel without penalty but your pavement sounds lovely I bet its warmer down there as well have you thought of airbnb

As an ex BT engineer , joined apprentice 1971 and did his ac transmission theory in  1974 I remember being pritty impressed with 128kb , isdn2 when it arrived. However when this magic broadband thingy that could possibly give a download speed of 2mb was proposed , down a bit of wet string copper wire. Well this was just nuts , it seemed to break all the rules of physics as I had been informed at collage. At the time big wealthy companies rented a thing called megastream of us, 2mb fed on special transverse screen cable or fibre at great expense.
And any way what domestic customer would possibly want , need or use that kind of speed. Then on a course at Paul Street London I met a man who was fitting some of the first, so I asked what the average speed real world was and what was the customers thoughts .The reply was about 1mb and it was to slow, what!!!, to slow.I could not get my head around it , I was still on dail up, 20 ish kb. Now I get about 23mb, the wife said yesterday if the broadband speed did not improve here maybe we should move to a house where fttp was available. 

Some years ago we watched a compeditor in amazement install a full fibre network by contractor in a local city centre at vast speed. They just cut an big angle grinder slot a couple of inches deep in the pavement poked the fibre in and poured a bit of black bitumin over the slot. 
A couple of years later the council pavered in the pavements to pedestrianies the area, good night network.

Subcontractor may also be doing work for BT (or another company) I've certainly come across Kelly doing BT work as well.

If it's Openreach then I suspect they'll own the infrastructure and then lease it to other other ISPs similar to how they operate for Phone/ADSL (You may pay the phone bill to the likes of Sky/ Zen etc. but they'll then be paying part of the cost to BT).


You can splice fibres to join them together (or repair) but you can't add a new connection to an existing fibre circuit in the same way they might for power/gas/electricity. The same would also apply for telephone circuits and ADSL back to the cab/exchange (each connection needs it's own pair of wires back to the active equipment. I think cable internet (Virgin) is different where a number of houses are on a single coax cable that daisy chains between a few properties.

Fibre cables usually contain a large number of fibre cores (or more recently) a set of empty tubes that can then have fibre cores blown through them. Back when the cables were manufactured with glass fibres inside they might run a a few large cables down various streets from the local street cab / exchange / point of presence (pop) to a splice box and then splice smaller cables out from there. With blown fibre they can connect a set of tubes together down the various cable runs and then blow a set of fibre cores from one end (cab/exchange/pop) to the other (street splice box).

(That's mostly based on my old experience doing networking between buildings on a site and between a few nearby sites)