BT to offer 300Mbit/s fibre to the home in 2013

BT plans to offer customers 300Mbit/s broadband next year, after successful trials of fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) technology in St Agnes, Cornwall.

The company will offer FTTP to customers in areas that are fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) enabled, for an additional fee.

BT said this "on-demand" FTTP would offer customers speeds of up to 300Mbit/s.

It also announced that its FTTC broadband, which currently delivers 40Mbit/s download speeds, will be doubled this spring to 80Mbit/s.

According to communications regulator Ofcom, UK broadband speeds averaged 7.6Mbit/s in November 2011, a 22 per cent increase on November 2010 speeds.

BT expects the FTTP technology to be of particular interest to small and medium-sized enterprises that need to send and receive large amounts of data.

In December last year, BT said that it will add 178 exchanges to its £2.5bn fibre deployment programme in order to reach its target of delivering superfast broadband to two-thirds of UK premises by the end of 2014.

It said that in line with its 2014 target, seven million premises can currently access fibre broadband through BT and this will rise to 10 million in 2012. The telecoms provider said it will bid for Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) funds to make fibre broadband available to 90 per cent of UK premises at some point in the future.