Smokend Info Blog

The UK’s telecom giant British Telecom has unveiled its latest plans to put the UK on top of the list of nations having enhanced broadband network. BT’s announcement followed a similar one made earlier, in which it detailed plans to establish a fibre optic network for enabling high-speed broadband access across the country. The earlier proposal outlined upgrade in broadband services for about a million homes by the year 2012.

The latest announcement from BT is that the 2012 deadline will see not 1 million but 2.5 million homes enjoying high speed broadband. A sizeable budget of £1.5 billion has been estimated to make Britain ready for future broadband.

The announcement came as a pleasant surprise for the broadband UK beneficiaries. BT appears to have taken the UK’s poor rating in the recent Cisco survey quite seriously, and is therefore determined to raise the nation up from its discouraging 31^st rank among 66 nations in terms of broadband speeds.

Fibre optic cables with fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology will be used under the new scheme, which will link homes directly to the exchange. This is expected to give up to 100 Mb of download speed with an optional upgrade provision of up to 1Gb if necessary.

Under the earlier scheme, testing had already been undertaken to study the viability of using FTTC (fibre-to-the-cabinet) alongside FTTP. Under the FTTC technology, copper wires are used from the streets to the homes. The CEO of Openreach has confirmed that once completed, this project will propel UK’s economic fortunes to a great extent.

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