‘Fibre To The Boat’ Provides London Houseboats With 1Gbps Broadband

Residential boats in London’s South Dock Marina can now receive broadband speeds of up to 1Gbps after fibre to the premise (FTTP) provider Hyperoptic extended its network to South Dock and Greenland Dock.

Hyperoptic’s network covers many parts of the capital, and decided to intervene in the marina once it learned about the poor broadband service received by residents, many of which have relied on cellular dongles for connectivity.

Fibre to the boat

The company installed fibre into each dock’s communications hub and connected each residential boat with Cat5e cabling. Demand for ‘fibre to the boat’ has been high, with half of the dock’s combined 100 berths taking up one of Hpyeroptic’s 20Mbps, 100Mbps or 1Gbps broadband packages.

“Mobile signals are flaky on a steel hulled Dutch barge and teens quickly exhaust data plans,” said Stephen Waddington, a resident on Greenland Dock. “The dock is on the opposite side of the river for Canary Wharf but lacked its data infrastructure. Having a high-speed fibre solution to the pontoon means we have better broadband than a lot of people in the UK have in their houses.”

“I never envisaged a jump from nothing to a gigabit,” said Patrick Keating, harbour master at Southwark Council. “The residents are thrilled.”

The majority of the UK’s superfast broadband infrastructure uses fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) technology, which uses copper for the final few metres of the connection. FTTP uses fibre for the entire connection, boosting speeds.

Hyperoptic says just one percent of the UK population can receive FTTP, but rivals CityFibre, TalkTalk and Sky are working on rival FTTP infrastructure, while BT has plans to rollout speeds of 500Mbps using existing copper infrastructure thanks to G.Fast technology.

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