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Story: Ofcom: UK broadband speeds lower than promised

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So what of Dark Fibre?

I would assume from your stated speed that you are 'out in the boonies'. I am prepared to be corrected on this.

I have heard from many FSB members who are, like you, trying to run their businesses but the broadband is a major failure point with poor speeds experienced by the purchaser.

I am lucky to live in a cabled area and the speed touted is 20Mb, with a promised 50Mb sometime soon. Yet, these speeds are almost irrelevent as they are really based on the connection speed from me to the head-end connection of my ISP, the speed of the rest of the internet is nothing like the speed offered by my ISP.

So, ISP's seem to be as popular as politicians with the majority of them not providing what they say they will. Yet, there is an interesting back story here. There are apparently miles and miles of 'dark fibre' this is fibre-optic cable that has been laid but not 'lit' or made active. Dark Fibre comes from telco's who built excess capacity into their networks because of the original costs involves of laying the cable in the first place. Most of this was done around the dotcom boom.

The question is if all this dark fibre exists, and customers are experiencing poor quality service, why not light the dark fibre and increase the available bandwidth so that people might actually get what they are paying for?

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