Monday, April 1st, 2019 (12:01 am) - Score 13,305

A new civil engineering method has been developed called ‘Just Chuck it on the Surface’ (JCoS), which looks set to replace modern approaches by making it both massively faster and cheaper to deploy new Gigabit capable fibre optic broadband networks, with only minimal effort required.

“I can’t believe we never thought of doing this before! All these years we’ve just been digging the fibre underground with expensive equipment or laying cable along the tops of telegraph poles, when we could have simply thrown it on the ground with our bare hands instead!,” said Bob Builder, CEO of Fast Access Infrastructure Lan.

The new civil engineering solution, which appears to have borrowed some of its innovations from telecoms operators in a number of “developing countries“, does not require any expensive civil engineering equipment except for something to help splice the cable and hold the fibre drum. Estimates indicate that by using this method it could take as little as 10 minutes to fibre-up an entire street with access to Gigabit speeds.

The solution relies almost entirely on man power to grab the cable, roll it out a bit, break for a cuppa and then splice in a few connections. After that the fibre is simply left on the ground and if any breakages occur then a dedicated team of engineers is quickly dispatched to fix it. Crucially Bob recognises that network outages may become more common with this approach but he has a solution for that too.

As Bob explains, “Obviously the movement of cars, people, animals, weather and plants could present a few challenges to our deployment method but the good thing about JCoS is that you can easily build-in redundancy. Our plan is to simply add more cables so that every home is connected by at least four to ten different and separate optical fibres, secured with duct tape, thus if one breaks then we still have plenty of backups.”

However JCoS has faced some criticism from the government’s currently understaffed Department for Health and Common Sense (DHCS), which is concerned about the sheer number of cables that could end up peppering communities across the UK and obstructing pavements, as well as roads. Luckily Bob has an answer for that too and he suggests, in areas where such a concern exists, that the cables could simply be covered by new soil from local gardens.

The UK government is already understood to be considering several trials. Further details can be found here.

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April Fools! Obviously..