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

Great!

[microbee]

So we'll have much faster BitTorrent downloads? Oh wait..

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

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah... Been there, done that...
Optical broadband is already rolled out in Norway, the "entry level" line is 10/10mb (yes, symetric), very stable and high quality with separate extra bandwith for Ip TV.

Now, if the rest of the world follows, internet content will only get heavier and the demand for even more bandwith will grow :-(

Guess we'll have to double the bandwith every 18 month in the future?

Re:Anonymous Coward

[starsky51]

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

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.

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...

[Computershack]

Dumbass. It's your ISP that implemets the caps and throttling, not BT Openreach. They merely provide the connectivity from the POP to the customer.

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.

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?

[RegularFry]

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

A big step forward

[renesch]

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

Re:A big step forward

[MichaelSmith]

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

That'l show those terrorists.

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

[wvmarle]

Available NOW, not in a few years?

Hong Kong has it. 30 Mbit (down, 10 Mbit up) for cheap (about USD 33 per month) and up to 1,000 Mbit for those with more money to waste (about USD 280 per month). This is for residential use, by the way. Available in residential buildings.

Admittedly not available everywhere (like for me: I only can get traditional ADSL but then I'm living in a village so no surprise there), still this is nothing new. Good for the UK that they are catching up with their former colony.

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

[Rakshasa Taisab]

In Japan... Living in what would be consider the worst part of the greater tokyo area, and on 100/100 optical connection.

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

[Bloater]

We already have fiber broadband over large parts of the UK. I had it installed nearly two years ago by Virgin Media.

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:FTTC? Next gen? Another UK FAIL!

[SwedishPenguin]

Isn't FTTH Fiber to the home? How is that last gen? And what would be the current gen? I mean i suppose technically I could connect to my fiber modem by fiber instead of TP-cable, but my connection is capped at 100 Mbps anyway..

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?

Why Scotland?

[Dark$ide]

Why Scotland? Nobody lives in Scotland, they send all their bankers and politicians south of the border to ruin my life and charge me exorbitant taxes.

I wish BT would get a move on with this in England. I'm on aluminium cable last 800 metres from the cabinet to my house and that struggles to run 512/216 ADSL.

If they want a beta tester I'll do that for them.

I wouldn't hold your breath

[FridgeFreezer]

Cast your mind back to 2004 when BT announced they would roll out 21CN (ADSL2, VoIP, etc. and replacing the entire UK core network with IP), they were due to be rolling over more than 10,000 customers per day by now onto this new network, and be finished in plenty of time for everyone to watch the 2012 Olympics in HD video-over-broadband.

Guess how many they've done so far...

Of course, if you read their website now the original goalposts have been burned and some new ones installed much further apart and in a different place on the pitch: http://www.btplc.com/21CN/Theroadto21CN/Keymilestones/Keymilestones.htm

Re:I wouldn't hold your breath

[c_g_hills]

I especially like this little tidbit from near the end:-

BT believes it is the only operator in the world to commit to a planned national rollout of a next generation network

I wonder what planet they are living on - maybe the same one as Sol Trujillo of former Telstra infamy.

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.

Available in certain areas in the Netherlands now

[Ixlr8]

Some cities in the Netherlands already have broadband fibre options for residential connections. Living in one of the pilot areas in Amsterdam, I am currently enjoying 20 Mbit/s (symmetrical!), but could go up to 100 Mbit/s (also symmetrical) if I'm willing to pay more.

Internet service can be combined with telephone and radio/TV. RTV is converted to old fashioned cable signal in your home, which with good cabling (and proper channel separation (which they did take care of)) gives excellent TV image quality, without slow channel switching, digital artefacts, and one-TV-only downsides typical for other digital TV services.

The good thing is (IMHO) they separated the network itself from the service providers, so you can have your choice of who (and what) you pay for. I'm just getting internet, because the TV package is missing BBC1 and 2 due to stupid monopoly of the old fashioned cable companies.

Re:Virgin Media UK already provides 50Mbit fiber o

[c_g_hills]

I once made a complaint to the ASA (Advertising Standards Association) but it was not upheld because apparently the average consumer would not draw that conclusion.

Fiber to the Cabinet?

[thyristor pt]

That's old news. In Portugal we're already developing a nation wide Fiber to the Home network. Everyone gets a fiber with 100Mb.

"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".