How does full fibre get to my house?

Hampshire Broadband went to Norfolk on Monday 27th November to see progress on the latest full fibre network being installed by the same partners as us.

The armoured fibre is about the thickness of your finger and is buried about 14 inches ( 350mm ) below the surface of fields using a mole plough attached to the tractor .

The fibre is very tough and is buried around the edges of fields in the area that does not get ploughed or dug over. In Norfolk they had 6 metres of headland and the fibre was laid about 1.5 metres from the hedges. We saw routes where the fibre had been laid within the previous week. We could see the marks of the tractor tyres but the line where the fibre had been buried was hardly visible in the grass.

Where the fibre was joined there were simple manhole covers with a chamber that looked like this .

The fibres are about the thickness of a hair and are joined together by a fusing or welding process

The connections to houses used a smaller diameter of armoured fibre , about the thickness of a pencil. This connected to the main fibres on the pale grey trays in the black box in the picture above .

Everything is underground and is not affected by wind , water or electric cables. No need to have telegraph poles across fields after full fibre broadband is installed. Because it is underground, fibre has proved much more reliable than traditional telephone wires in the 35 plus years that it has been used for telecommunications.