BT Shows First Fiber-Optic Broadband Rollout Plans

MJackson writes "BT has revealed new details about the roll-out of its £1.5bn programme to deploy super fast fibre optic broadband to as many as 10 million UK homes (40%) by 2012. Scotland will become one of the first places to benefit from next-generation broadband services, with more than 34,000 homes and businesses in Edinburgh and Glasgow receiving speeds of up to 40Mbps and potentially 60Mbps from early next year (2010). Overall, BT Openreach, which is responsible for ensuring that all rival operators have equality of access to BT's local network, aims to deploy Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) based next generation broadband services next summer (2010) to 500,000 homes and businesses in the UK."

Comments

Too little...

[antanca]

I'd appreciate the investment, but it's too little, too late. Bandwidth will inevitably be capped and throttled to hell; this is BT we're talking about. Not to mention Phorm. 500,000 homes is rather a small portion, too, and they will most probably neglect south western England and rural areas as usual. I'm enjoying my 1mbps downstream immensely.

Re:Too little...

[Xest]

It's not just South Western England and rural areas, it's pretty much all of Yorkshire (North, East, South and West) and the Lake District as well as much of Scotland and most of Wales. About the only places not neglected are London and some other big cities like Manchester.

We're seeing signs of rollouts to rural areas to appease OFCOM but they always go to the extreme with this, they rollout a 1mbps connection to a single person in the middle of the Pennines or whatever and go "Look, we care about rural people!" whilst ignoring the millions that live in much less remote rural locations but still get shafted.

What annoys me most is that I'm only 3km from the exchange and have SnR ratio and other factors well within the bounds of 8mbps yet I can only sync at 1.6 to 2.2mbps and we've even had new lines into our house not so long ago, there's definitely not an issue with our wiring (checked, checked and checked again) so the issue has to be from the top of the street to the exchange or the exchange itself - it effects my neighbours too yet BT will do absolutely nothing about it because it's a rural area so we have this situation where even people in rural areas who could get 8mbps or damn near can't get it simply because BT don't want to spend money fixing faults. I also don't believe the governments scheme to mandate a minimum of 2mbps will help because BT will just say "Well look he sync'd at 2.1mbps for 30mins 7 weeks ago so surely that's good enough!" despite the fact I'm stuck at 1.6mbps 99% of the time.

Oh, and did I forget to mention, every time it rains heavily my line repeatedly drops and needs to re-sync as do my neighbours - again, it's pretty clear something is screwed at the exchange or along the lines but BT simply do not care, neither do OFCOM and there's nothing we can do about it.

BT do the bare minimum to keep OFCOM and the government happy and the government and OFCOM are happy (as with everything) with the bare minimum and that's the problem. There is no sign of us getting a technically competent government anytime soon however - The Conservatives have stated they'll put someone from the creative (i.e. content) industries in charges of the UK's broadband future so we can only expect things to get worse under them as they have demonstrated on countless occasions they're in big content's pockets.

A big step forward

[renesch]

now they will be able to install CCTVs even in private homes

Re:What do we need the bandwidth for?

[RegularFry]

iPlayer and whatever content providers BT wants to get into bed with will eat this up.

Re:FTTC? Next gen? Another UK FAIL!

[Fneb]

Yeah, our internet's a bit behind the curve for similarly developed countries. FTTC is a big step up from ADSL2 though, even if it's not as good as FTTH (which would have cost far more I imagine. Out of interest, what do you call better than FTTH? PTP? Wossat?

Re:Anonymous Coward

[starsky51]

You're right. Progress is a pain in the arse!

Re:Not too bad... how about 1,000 MBps?

[TheThiefMaster]

Actually, despite their advertising, all Virgin have deployed is a fiber backbone, not "fiber broadband", which would include fibre to the home. For the last mile their 50Mb service goes over the same cables they've used all along.

Not that it matters much when you get 50Mbps downstream and nearly 2Mbps upstream.

Re:Virgin Media UK already provides 50Mbit fiber o

[Anonymous Coward]

Only their backbone is fibre (well, yes, it would normally be). The actual cable network is coaxial cable. They haven't really touched the cables from when NTL/Telewest ran it, and although their service can be good, it's subject to traffic shaping, stringent limits, and is extremely overcontended in many areas.

Very misleading, I know. Someone really should pull them up on that.

Scotland is first because...

[Dan B.]

...both Edinburgh and Glasgow have relatively few BT customers at present. The residents in each city looking for broadband are pretty much all subscribers to the two major cable companies that provide phone services, pay TV and unlimited 1~10MB (shared bandwidth) cable internet for a fairly low fee. The cities are also fairly dense, but not too populated, thus making them good public pilot sites. There are also two fantastic Universities right in the heart of the cities that probably influence a lot of local council decisions.

"super fast fibre optic broadband"?!?

[Heddahenrik]

40 Mbit/s is not "super fast fibre optic broadband". It's "slow fibre optic broadband".

Here in Sweden it's quite common with 100/100, and I have 80/10 Mbit/s (or 80/16 is more close to reality).

"super fast fibre optic broadband" would be something more than 1 Gbit/s. 1 Gbit/s would be "fast fibre optic broadband".

Re:Anonymous Coward

[alexhard]

What's your point? ISPs have very good returns to scale. Also, there places like London in the UK with ridiculous population densities, which (theoretically) makes it much easier to provide high speed broadband. The problem always has been, is, and will be BT.

Re:Great!

[xaxa]

What use is a faster connection at home if the *insertURLhere* server only gives me 5% of what my brand spanking new fiber optic soundwave ultra-awesome connection has to offer?

* Sharing a single connection between multiple users
* Streaming video (e.g. iPlayer, or IPTV)
* VPN, e.g. for working from home