Its coming at long last, hyperoptic have turned on hyperfast broadband at our exchange in New Islington and I have a order for next Thursday to hook me up with 1gigbit hyperfast broadband. Yes Hyperfast is the correct term…
Hyperfast broadband might be used to describe speeds of 500Mb or higher, while gigabit broadband refers to services capable of achieving connections of 1Gb (1000Mb or 1 gigabit) or higher. While no national providers currently offer services of these speeds, some smaller local providers are already offering extremely fast full fibre optic broadband with the capacity to reach speeds of up to 1Gb.
You might remember me talking about them in the past, a whole 18months ago! So why has there been such a delay? Well to be clear it wasn’t due to the lack of interest on the part of Islington Wharf. We got 25% sign up across the complex really quickly. Hyperoptic put in the infrastructure within the building pretty quickly. But it wasn’t to be because when the test switch on was tried, nothing worked. They traced it back to a fault in the connection. Something had happened in connection with the new tram station and the work on the tramline.
When they built the tunnel for the tram line to Ashton from Piccadilly Station, it went underneath great ancoasts street which is a part of the inner ring road in Manchester. The work crushed or damaged some of the fibre conduits. When it was identified this was a serious problem, hyperoptic had to seek permission from the local council to close part of the ring road to allow work to fix the crushed fibre conduit. You can imagine this isn’t a trivial asking and getting the council to do anything in regards to road works is always going to be a very slow process.
From Hyperoptic,
…Establishing a clear fibre route from the exchange to Islington Wharf is taking longer than anticipated due to a blockage. We’re waiting on permission from the Council’s Highways Authority to start the clearance work as it requires road closures.
@cnorthwood @millinerswharf – we're here!!! pic.twitter.com/DWzDeYe0QZ
— Hyperoptic (@Hyperoptic) May 29, 2014
While waiting for things to be fixed, Hyperoptic wired up Milliners Wharf, which is about 5mins walk away up the canal (I actually over look it from my flat). Luckily they are on a different exchange and there is no canal blocking things. So they got hyperoptic ahead of islington wharf, even though we had sign up much earlier. Chris decided to go for the 100meg option, oppose to the 1gig version. Of course I went for the 1gig version.
So after 18months things got sorted and this Thursday I have the hyperoptic engineer coming to hook up my flat up. I’m looking forward to running my own speed test and downloading all those Linux ISO. I’m also looking forward to utilising the 2.5Tb of spideroak storage. I’m was considering the unlimited option they had a while ago.
I have been reading their terms, conditions and fair use policy again to make sure I won’t be cut off. It all looks fine still, but running a tor node might be out of the question maybe…