Plan to use water pipes for broadband on tap

Water pipes could be used to transport broadband to rural homes as the Government pledges to make the internet as easy to access as drinking water. As part of the £5 billion Project Gigabit upgrade, cables could be fed through pipes to avoid digging up roads and land. Stephen Unger, of the Geospatial Commission, said: “The best way to meet this challenge is to use existing infrastructure, such as the water pipes that already reach every home and business in the country.”

WATER pipes could be used to transport broadband to rural homes as the Government pledges to make the internet as easy to access as drinking water.

As part of the Government’s £5billion Project Gigabit broadband upgrade in hard-to-reach areas, fibre broadband cables could be fed through the country’s water pipes to avoid the disruption caused by digging up roads and land.

The trial will have £4 million available for innovators to experiment with what could be a quicker and more costeffective way of connecting fibre optic cables to homes, businesses and mobile masts.

The Fibre in Water project is due to conclude in March 2024, with a deadline of Oct 4 for applications to the competition.

Civil works, in particular installing new ducts and poles, can be up to 80 per cent of the cost to industry of building new gigabit-capable broadband networks.

Stephen Unger, commissioner at the Geospatial Commission, which is part of the Cabinet Office, warned that while “fibre is the future of digital communications” working with it would not necessarily be easy.

He said: “The best way to meet this challenge is to use existing infrastructure, such as the water pipes that already reach every home and business in the country. Our ambition must be for reliable broadband to become as easy to access tomorrow as drinking water is today.”

The project will also look to test solutions that reduce the amount of water lost every day due to leaks, which is 20 per cent of the total put into the public supply. This will involve putting connected sensors in the pipes that allow water companies to improve the speed and accuracy with which they can identify a leak and repair it.

The Government stresses that any trial of fibre optic cables in the water mains will be approved by the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) before being used in a real-world setting.

The DWI requires rigorous testing ahead of approving any products that can be used in drinking water pipes, and fibre has already been deployed in water pipes in other countries such as Spain.

Matt Warman, the digital infrastructure minister, said: “The cost of digging up roads and land is the biggest obstacle telecoms companies face when connecting hard-to-reach areas to better broadband, but beneath our feet there is a vast network of pipes reaching virtually every building in the country.”

Mr Warman said that the Government was calling on the nation’s “brilliant innovators to help us use this infrastructure to serve a dual purpose of serving up not just fresh and clean water but also lightning-fast digital connectivity”.

When Project Gigabit was announced in March, Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, wrote in The Telegraph: “As we build back better from the pandemic, gigabit is the game changer: a huge infrastructure project that will level up the [country].”

‘Beneath our feet there is a vast network of pipes reaching virtually every building in the country’