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

What do we need the bandwidth for?

[BestNicksRTaken]

If P2P is illegal - and frankly any internet traffic seems to be illegal according to the Orwellian UK government at the moment, what are we going to use 60Mbps for - checking Email?

Mind you, 60Mbps is really going to improve the performance of the botnets, so spam levels will go up.

Re:What do we need the bandwidth for?

[TheRaven64]

iPlayer streams are around 1Mb/s. Given the availability of fast enough consumer links, I wouldn't be surprised if the BBC started streaming the shows with the same format they broadcast them, which can eat up 20Mb/s easily. Two people in the house watching different streams? That's 40Mb/s. Download a big file in the background and you've got your 60Mb/s right there.

I doubt many people will be using 60Mb/s all of the time, but then I don't use all of the 10Mb/s I get now all of the time either (and if I did, my ISP couldn't afford to give me the service at the rate that they do).