Hyperoptic Trials 10Gbps Home Fibre Broadband

Hyperoptic has announced that a trial of home broadband in East Village, the site of the London 2012 Athletes’ Village, reached an incredible speed of 10Gbps.

The full fibre trial is being claimed by the ISP as being the “fastest home broadband the country has ever seen.”

It comes after rival ISP TalkTalk announced earlier this month that it intends to build a full fibre to the premise (FTTP) network to some 3 million homes and businesses in the UK.

Future Proofing?

Hyperoptic is a London-based full fibre Internet Service Provider (ISP). It said that it was able to demonstrate speeds some 276x faster than the average speed a UK consumer receives today. Ofcom’s figures say that the average UK speed is currently 36.2 Mbps.

The trial is interesting, as Hyperoptic says it is the first time it that speed has been brought to a UK home and using an existing ISP network, not a new, dedicated line.

But it does beggar the question as to the need for such a high performance broadband connection.

For example, a 10Gbps connection, allows for practically instantaneous downloads and uploads of HD and 4K, even with multiple, heavy users. A standard HD movie file (5GB) could be downloaded in 4 seconds, compared to 6 minutes 40 seconds on a 100Mbps connection

“The amount of internet data used by people in the UK is growing by around half every year,” said Sharon White, Ofcom Chief Executive, who attended the trial. “So we’ll increasingly need full-fibre broadband services like this to provide faster, more reliable connections and capacity to our homes and offices. We’re seeing real momentum behind full-fibre, with bigger and bolder commitments from companies of all sizes to build broadband that can support the UK’s digital future.”

The trial was carried out with the Get Living, which owns and manages 1,500 homes for rent at East Village, the site of London 2012 Athletes’ Village.

Residents in that location can already enjoy gigabit connections, Hyperoptic says that the trial shows that its network is able to go much, much faster.

“We have carried out this trial to elevate the debate in a largely stagnate industry,” said Dana Tobak, CEO of Hyperoptic. “While the market incumbents focus on sweating their copper assets and lobbying the likes of the ASA to convince them that its acceptable to market their Fibre-to-the-Cabinet services as ‘fibre,’ we are proudly setting a new standard.

“With full fibre our customers across 30 UK towns and cities can enjoy symmetrical gigabit services today,” said Tobak. “This 10Gb test proves that our network can scale in the future.”

The trial was apparently measured via a speed-test server located in a Hyperoptic Data Centre.

Full Fibre

There is no doubt that Hyperoptic has ambitious targets.

Last July it said it plans to bring 1Gbps fibre to the premise (FTTP) broadband to two million homes by 2022 and five million by 2025.

But it may faced competition going forward.

BT for example has now turned its attention to FTTP, having long been devoted to fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) technology, which makes use of existing copper infrastructure.

Openreach plans to reach 12 million homes by the end of the decade using a combination of fibre to the premise (FTTP) and G.Fast, which speeds up copper connections.

Others, including Gigaclear, CityFibre and Virgin Media are also investing in FTTP, while the government is keen to see greater coverage of ‘pure’ fibre.

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