Bournemouth council offices have been connected up with fibre optic cables run through in the city's sewers.

H2O Networks is responsible for the network, which was laid in seven days and will provide unprecedented connection speeds, without relying on BT infrastructure, though it will initially only operate as a backup network.

At this stage, Bournemouth has no particular plans for making use of this enormous jump in connectivity between its premises.

Using existing tunnels makes far more sense than digging up roads to create new ones, and sewer tunnels are generally deeper than can be reached by the kind of mechanical digger that disrupts connectivity when mistakes are made.

The use of sewers, steam tunnels, or old mole homes is great if it means more connectivity with less disruption, and as the chap from the council agreed, you can never have too much bandwidth. ®

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• 100Mbit/s sewer broadband rollout coming your way (24 January 2008)
• Sewers used for laying cables (20 April 2006)
• Sewer broadband idea floated again (4 February 2004)
• BT sniffs at broadband in the sewer (24 January 2002)