A big challenge to deploying telecom infrastructure is access to fiber optic cabling – sometimes cables just aren’t available where infrastructure needs to be in order to provide end users the value to justify the capital expenditure.
The United Kingdom town of Chesham took a novel approach to solving the fiber access issue by installing Wi-Fi access points on city manhole covers, which already served as access points to the existing fiber network.
The public Wi-Fi deployment boasts speeds of up to 166 megabits per second. The access points are mounted on the underside of the manhole covers where the units are hooked into Virgin Media’s fiber optic network.
Local business owner Martin Parkes said the public Wi-Fi project allows small business to offer the same amenities (public Wi-Fi) as larger chains and malls.
“It’s great that our customers have access to Virgin Media’s public Wi-Fi both in and outside our salon,” Parkes said. “We’re a very unique high street with many independent shops, so we don’t have the IT infrastructure that big chains benefit from. This will hugely help level the playing field and will hopefully bring more people to Chesham, too.”
Local politician Fred Wilson said the project helps “local people and businesses get online,” in the town of 21,000. “Efficient connectivity is pivotal to running businesses today and I am proud we are part of a project which is crossing new boundaries.”
In August, Virgin Media announced it’s planning a free, public Wi-Fi deployment in the United Kingdom using its Super Hub hot spots.
The U.S. analogy would be what cable providers Time Warner Cable and Comcast have done. Time Warner customers can access some 400,000 hot spots run by Time Warner or partner operators. Comcast claims more than 8 million Wi-Fi hot spots, concentrated on the East and West coasts, with some areas so densely covered the network can support voice-over-Wi-Fi service.
“The public hot spot will be powered by additional bandwidth being sent to the router, which will be accessed via a separate IP address,” a Virgin Media spokesman told Pocket-lint.com.