Hello,

Because I think that trying to modulate a high frequency signal some distance down a pair of old copper wires is daft, I currently get my broadband via a 3G dongle, which is fine for my purposes but costs an arm and a leg.

The local infrastructure provider (BT Openreach, which was created in 2002 to separate the infrastructure from BT itself and allow other providers equal access) has two products that would improve things a little: Fibre To The Cabinet, which connects to the box stood at the southernmost point of my estate and modulates a signal over a shorter length of copper to my flat, and Fibre To The Premises, which actually involves shoving a fibre into your property.

As it stands, I can only get FTTC in my particular area. I did think about holding out for FTTP, but that was before I read about the technology behind it, GPON, which amounts to running in half duplex with about 30 other people on your fibre.

Now, I've a talent for crazy ideas (), so in order to be able to enjoy the future now as opposed to whenever the telcos feel like it, I came up with this:-

There is a data centre less than 5 miles away. It is carrier-neutral, so getting an uplink to the Internet should be straightforward. If I could persuade a load of other people on my estate to "trial" a new service, give it a stupid marketing term like "sexyfast broadband", what are the odds of hooking everyone up with multimode 100BaseFX/SX media converters, connecting them to a fibre switch somewhere, and then firing a singlemode pair to a switch in the data centre?

The only problem with this idea is that I haven't a clue where to start with the infra side of things!. The main issues are that I would need somewhere to put the fibres on the estate (I'd probably need to build my own roadside cabinet), and then somehow run a pair for 5 miles. I'm not enthusiastic if I have to dig up roads, but I don't think that I should need to do this, given modern infrastructure.

I could talk to Openreach, but as they are still technically part of BT, I suspect that this idea would attract much stroking of chin and "ooo err you don't wanna do that", culminating in a huge price tag for the work.

It's a pipe dream I suppose, but in the right area I reckon that this could be done.

Thoughts?