BT picks Oxfordshire village for first fibre-only exchange pilot

Homes and businesses in Deddington to get access to superfast broadband

BT will launch its first pilot in its fibre-only exchange programme in Deddington, Oxfordshire, in a move that will enable homes and businesses in the area to benefit from superfast broadband speeds.

The pilot is part of a long-term project that will experiment with a fibre-only community in which services over copper are replaced entirely with fibre-optic cables.

The pilot will also allow communication providers in Deddington to build and test a suite of new products that will only run over fibre.

BT said that Deddington is the ideal size for the pilot because it is a small rural exchange serving about 1,400 lines.

Along with the faster downstream speeds of between up to 40Mbit/s and up to 300Mbit/s in all homes and businesses in the village, BT said that upstream speeds will also be significantly faster.

Currently, residents receive a maximum broadband speed of 6-8Mbit/s.

BT's local network division, Openreach, will start infrastructure work this spring and BT said that faster broadband speeds will be available in homes and businesses in Deddington from 2013 onwards.

"Fresh advances in technology are pushing the boundaries for new services on an almost daily basis," said Sean Williams, group strategy director at BT.

"This is an important pilot which will help the industry better understand the opportunities arising from a fibre-only world in which traditional copper will be replaced by the super-fast capabilities of fibre-optic cable," he said.