Openreach provides new optical fibre product to support Digital Britain
BT's fibre-optic broadband rollout starts today
06 Jul 2009, Dave Bailey, Computing
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/1818345/bts-fibre-optic-broadband-rollout-starts
Residential customers and businesses will start to gain access to next-generation broadband connectivity today as the first operational pilots spearhead BT's push into optical-fibre network access for the UK, as outlined in Lord Carter's Digital Britain report.
Muswell Hill in North London, and Whitchurch near Cardiff are the first two locations for BT's rollout. ISPs participating in Openreach's new optical fibre-based access product include BT Wholesale, Carphone Warehouse, O2 and Sky. The initial project will enable 15,000 premises to try out the new service, with more than 100 of BT's green street cabinets becoming fibre-enabled.
BT's access arm Openreach is providing the new product supporting the connectivity trial. Generic Ethernet Access over Fibre to the Cabinet (GEA-FTTC), has performance of up to 40Mbit/s download and a standard upload speed of 2Mbit/s, with an optional upload speed of 5Mbit/s. BT strategy and portfolio group director Olivia Garfield said that upstream speeds, "would be adjusted by Openreach as service rollout proceeds in the next six to 12 months."
But there are concerns from smaller carriers and ISPs about the recently published Ofcom consultation, "Variation to BT’s Undertakings under the Enterprise Act 2002 related to Fibre-to-the-Cabinet. " The major effect of this variation', "allows BT’s Openreach division to control and operate electronic equipment necessary to provide super-fast broadband services using FTTC."
An important aspect of this change concerns what kind of service-level agreement (SLA) applies to the new product. With ADSL-based broadband systems, that use twisted copper pairs to carry data as well as narrowband voice traffic (standard PSTN phone calls), SLAs were limited to "best endeavours". This meant that in times of high download traffic, users could find download speed capacity decrease significantly, to lower speeds than they thought they were legally entitled to.
At a recent roundtable on BT's plans and its roadmap for FTTC rollouts, Openreach managing director for next-generation access David Campbell said that although Openreach would rectify faults with downloads speeds dropping below 15Mbit/s, "any SLAs provided would be the responsibility of the ISP providing the service to users premises, from the street cabinet," he said.
Cable & Wireless said in the consultation that it would like to see " SLAs offered by Openreach should address the requirements of business users."
Broadband Stakeholder Group chief executive Antony Walker said that download speed was not the determining capability of the new BT product.
"You have to look at the full characteristics of this offering, the better upload speeds on offer gives businesses a chance to open up new markets and services, whilst the improved latency gives you better interactive performance, for example with videoconferencing," he said.
Fibre-based broadband connectivity is already available to premises within the reach of Virgin Media's cable network.
Reader comments
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Poor Broadband In North Wales
The Welsh Assembly does not think that North Wales exists, all that is said is we are near Manchester and Liverpool but why should they pay! We are in Wales and more money should come here to pay for fibre not just in South Wales. If you look at the rollout of the new fibre we don't get a mention. Gordon Brown's Government says we should all have as a minimum 2 Meg, I would love to get 1meg and I am sure so would many others. So let's have some equal right with South Wales and spend some money in the North.
Posted by: Martin 17 Jul 2009
It's not just up north!
Here, in the Sovereign Chase estate in Cardiff, we have "broadband".
Except it barely ever reaches 1mbps.
A megabit per second would be great, however, even so, that's minute compared to common speeds now.
We were late getting broadband here, so why fibre optics weren't laid down is beyond me!
Please BT or Virgin, do something about it!
Posted by: Rhys 23 Jul 2009
dubious in muswell hill
i live in muswell hill and its by chance if i get the speeds they are talking about. i am with one of the ISPs that are participating in the openreach project, but i have to be selected to participate in a TRIAL of the system!! i was looking forward to having the speeds this summer, but my ISP and the other ones participating want to trial the new technolgy b4 rolling out to all custmers in muswell hill. :(
which is good in a way, so they can provide the support needed on the technical side and garrentee the stability of the service, u dont want a outage of your connection when ur working online.
good luck to the trials i say, maybe i may still be involved in that process?
Posted by: lalith 30 Jul 2009
Cornwall & Devon Internet
Could we perhaps focus a bit more on getting the West & South-West of Britain to the same speeds as the rest of the country before kicking up projects for even greater speeds around key parts of England?
It's getting quite sad how the East of England had 50MB Fibre Optic Broadband while we're shot down with 6.5MB... if we're lucky!
Looking at a map of the Fibre Optic network going around the country, it's a joke how it just turns around after reaching the South-West border to go up to the north of England.
Posted by: Andy 08 Sep 2009
Warrington
I live in warrington where they do have virgin media but not in my street I'm lucky if i get 1mb on adsl come on bt get your finger out
Posted by: John 08 Sep 2009
The Trial is Exceptional
We have the fibre optic trial in East Finchley and we are getting 40Mbit/s wired and 26Mbit/s wireless.
I mean it's faster than fast. And great for hosting Xbox matches
Posted by: Marcus 19 Nov 2009
BT getting its finger out?
I live in Inverness in Scotland the so called highland capitol, and i've heard alot of arguments about fibre optic connections and about how affordable it would be to give the people of the uk the network.
The answer is simple: most of the country would give there front teeth for a fast network and be willing to pay the monthly fee if it was added to the phone bill and that's millions of people across the uk.
Posted by: Andrew 11 Mar 2010