BT fibre broadband rollout: 10 million homes by 2012

Just over a month has now passed since BT stunned industry observers by announcing a £1.5bn plan for the start of a major next-generation fibre broadband rollout, which could reach as many as 10 million homes by 2012.

The project aims to deliver a range of services, offering top downstream speeds of up to 100Mbps and the potential for 1000Mbps in the future.

The operator will use a mix of both Fibre to the Premise (FTTP) and Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) fibre optic (FTTx) technology to deliver the service. FTTP is expected to offer speeds of up to 100Mbps and will most likely only be used at newer developments.

FTTC is more likely to be used as an enhancement for existing infrastructure, which will initially result in speeds of up to 40Mbps becoming available, rising to 60Mbps later on.

Naturally many questions still surround the operator’s announcement and ISPreview.co.uk has this week set out to start answering some of them. The following represents the result of a brief interview that we recently conducted BT.

In it they confirm that the service will initially be an engineer install and that they believe Virgin Media should open its cable service up to competitors.

Source: Read