BT Takes Fiber Up To 300 Mbps Next Spring, 110 Mbps Now

British Telecom in the UK, through its OpenReach subsidiary, said this week that it is targeting 300 Mbps broadband in six UK regions by Spring next year using fiber.

Focal Points:

• It‘s a natural response by a telco that has to compete for broadband customers in a market with Virgin Media, which in July demonstrated a 1.5 Gbps broadband line. But the truth about its competition is more mundane. Virgin has 1 million of its customers on 20 Mbps and above and just 170,000 customers on 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps and it has only just introduced a new 30 Mbps tier to take over from its most popular 20 Mbps service. It won‘t be until mid-2012 when 100 Mbps will be avail- able right across its network. Interestingly Virgin has made all those improvements without a hint of an improvement in its overall ARPU.
• The introduction of such a service from BT would make the UK one of the few countries in Europe where the telco had faster lines than the cable operator (France probably does too).
• The first step though is a catch up step to 110 Mbps which BT has announced for the end of October in a fiber to the premises (FTTP) service in Ashford in Middlesex, Bradwell Abbey in Milton Keynes, Highams Park in North London, Chester South, St Austell and York.
• Later Openreach will accelerate this to 300 Mbps and BT claims that these speeds are three times faster than those offered by other major networks and says they will also be available on a wholesale basis. Many rival networks, including Sky offer both unbundled copper connections, and also wholesaled lines, so they will be able to use these lines. The offer by BT to makes its fiber available as a wholesale connection is in line with European Commission guidelines for unbundling fiber (see separate story).
• BT also said that it needed approval from relevant authorities to roughly double the speeds delivered by Fiber to the Cabinet (FTTC) broadband and that it now has this. This will see fiber to the street cabinet (FTTC) downstream speeds roughly double from up to 40Mbps to up to 80Mbps. We assume BT is saying that from the street cabinet it can offer VDSL2 over copper for the last hop to achieve these speeds.
• BT says it is investing £2.5 billion to make fiber broadband available to two thirds of UK premises by the end of 2015. That would amount to over16 million out of the 25 million homes in the UK, and it says it has achieved 5 million so far and is adding access at tens of thousands of new homes every week.

Most European countries are trying desperately to get up the Broadband league because it is thought to improve corporate competitiveness and the economy. The company said that fiber lines can eventually deliver up to 1Gbps and lines at that speed are currently being trialed by BT in Kesgrave, Suffolk, the area surrounding the Martlesham Heath , BT Laboratories near Ipswich.