Salisbury is a historic medieval city, however under the streets there’s a very modern communications infrastructure with a network of fibre cables linking to homes and businesses. Salisbury is fortunate in that it features quite high quantities of the newer full-fibre FTTP/H infrastructure. For instance, the housing estate at Bishopsdown is all wired up for full-fibre to the home (FTTH) and some businesses on and near Fisherton Street are also able to benefit from the ultimate in full-fibre connectivity.
Salisbury is our “Spotlight City” where we provide more information about what makes Salisbury one of the best-connected Cities in the UK for connectivity. We will explore what’s in Salisbury to
It all starts at the exchange.
Giganet’s rack in Salisbury Exchange before we installed our active equipment
Salisbury’s high-tech communication infrastructure all starts at the “telephone” exchange. A nondescript building in the centre of Salisbury, just three streets-away from the market square, houses the main equipment rooms that keep Salisbury connected to the internet and wider communications networks. It’s here that Giganet have invested in our own dedicated private equipment rack where we have installed our own networking hardware and have leased high capacity & future-proofed fibre backhaul to create a local Point of Presence in Salisbury from which to deliver our services to.
The exchange is owned by Openreach Limited, a separate business of BT Plc. In the late 2000s, Ofcom proposed a means by which competing networks could ‘unbundle’ the telephone exchanges across the UK to drive innovation, increase competition of the local access network and lower prices. BT obviously had almost a complete monopoly on the UK’s telecoms infrastructure before operators like Giganet could LLU (local loop unbundle) exchanges.
The exchange is just that, it’s a meeting point of all the fibre (and legacy copper) wires that link businesses and homes before aggregating them to onward networks and ultimately the Internet.
Giganet have a point of presence in the Salisbury exchange
As explained above, Giganet invested in our own dedicated equipment rack in the Salisbury exchange. This is a very unique offering from a smaller provider. Usually only the larger providers such as BT themselves, TalkTalk, Sky or Vodafone would unbundle an exchange. This is traditionally due to the complexity, costs and economics of unbundling. It was not straightforward navigating the complex Openreach order forms to get our exchange presence, but the benefit that this provides us is totally worth it.
By having our own presence in the Exchange, we’re able to purchase the communication services, such as fibre broadband and leased lines, at the lowest/raw level. This provides us:
- Better pricing – the lowest possible
- Lowest access to the network – reducing supply chain/middlemen
- More innovation – we’re able to create a lower cost FTTP full-fibre broadband service that no one else offers
- More control and support – as we have visibility right down to the lowest levels, we are better informed and thus can offer better support
