40 mb in England

BT Openreach has decided on two of its sites for its fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) pilot scheme, which is to take place next summer.

The two boroughs chosen are Muswell Hill in London and Whitchurch in South Glamorgan.

A BT spokesperson said about the fibre optic plans: "This is part of our £1.5bn investment in optical fibre deployments, and the sites were chosen in consultation with comms providers, ISPs, Regional Development Associations and because of the topology of the exchange. Basically they ticked all the right boxes."

Speed demon

To get the fibre optics into place, there will be a fair bit of digging to do, with approximately 15,000 homes to sort out with cabling, but it does mean that at the end of it, the lucky few who live in these areas will have "headline speeds of up to 40Mbit/s". Nice.

This comes after Virgin announced it is to offer speeds of up to 50Mb/s in London this year.

UPDATE

We spoke to Virgin Media about the BT news and here is the company's response: "As demand for on-line content and services grows, BT's announcement endorses Virgin Media's long-held view that super-fast broadband is what people want.

"Virgin Media is spearheading this roll-out by bringing a cutting edge 50Mb broadband service to some 12 million homes across the UK between now and the middle of 2009. Virgin Media's ability to do this is the result of a £13 billion investment in the UK's cable network."SOURCE

This post has been edited by Stiffchicken: Oct 24 2008, 12:04 AM

In the UK I have fibre optic installed to my front gate. I've been looking for a faster upload for my slingbox setup to Tenerife, so Virgin was an obvious choice. Alas! Upload speed is artificially limited, and Slingbox is incompatible with the bridge (not router) that is installed as a compulsory part of the package.

I've ended up pleading with my current ISP (ukonline) who have managed a 1MB upload pipe for me (by twiddling their end, it means sacrificing some download speed which I do not use in the UK anyway).

I hope the existing fibre-optic lines, laid some years ago in my area, are unbundled at some point in the future.

I freely admit to being a download whore and Virgin Media is enabled in my area plus I was with them at one point. 40/50 MB download sounds great too but I would not go back to Virgin Media if they paid me to have the line back. There is no earthly point in having all that speed when they cap it at certain times of the day to 5 MB and the upload speed is miserly. Their customer service is absolutely appalling as well.

My current ISP is BE who do up to 24 MB down and 2.5MB up for 22 GBP, the speed depending on how close to the exchange you are. I currently get 17 MB down, which I can happily live with. NO CAPPING, Unlimited means exactly that. It would be nice to have 50MB but there is no way in hell I would EVER go back to Virgin Media.

Great! So Two boroughs in the capital of England and the capital of Wales get this as a trial (in two cities that already have a plethora of choice for 24mbs unbundled ISP services) while the rest of the country outside the big towns and cities trundles along on a miserly 8mbs line

BT should be FORCED to trial this (and then roll it out) in communities that are being left behind in the broadband world because nobody wants to unbundle their exchanges... What we don't need is for BT to roll this out in places that already have cable or unbundled 24mbs exchanges.

BT Openreach? Bah! Whoever thinks this sort of thing up, should be dipped in beer and thrown in a pit of slugs

mmmmm..... unbundled exchange, oh even the thought of such a thing makes me hard.

Oi I work for BT Openreach one of those great guys dealing wwith the fibre..I have no idea what imm doing

That is sooooo reassuring Siris.

OK, you can stay in the beer... but your boss is definitely coming out and going in the slug pit.