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When will you get superfast broadband?

Posted on 6 Nov 2009 at 15:14

The good news is that BT is guaranteeing that fibre-to-the-cabinet connections will achieve at least 15Mbits/sec. “There will be an SLA [service level agreement] associated with the product,” David Campbell, managing director of next-generation access at BT Openreach told us at a briefing earlier this summer. “We’ll accept a fault and fix it if the line drops below 15Mbits/sec.”

While 15Mbits/sec sounds like a steep drop from the headline figure of 40Mbits/sec, it’s more than three times as fast as today’s average broadband connection, so it’s progress of a sort.

We’ll accept a fault and fix it if the line drops below 15Mbits/sec

Indeed, Zen Internet is expecting something of a stampede for fibre. “It is likely that one of our main challenges will be managing customer expectations for delivery of the service to their area,” said Zen Internet’s Saunders.

Who will get 40Mbits/sec?

Click here to find out if your town is among the 98 that BT has already earmarked for fibre. Those not on the list will have to wait patiently until BT announces the next tranche of exchanges. With ten million premises due to be connected to FTTC by 2012, the likelihood is that most people living in major towns and cities will have fibre within three years. Rural dwellers may not be as lucky.

24Mbits/sec

Sitting directly beneath FTTC are ADSL2+ lines, offering connection speeds of up to 24Mbits/sec (although rarely hitting that headline speed). Many of the broadband providers that have installed their own equipment in telephone exchanges – so-called Local Loop Unbundled (LLU) providers such as O2 and Be – have been offering ADSL2+ lines for a couple of years.

They’re now facing long-overdue competition from ISPs that offer connections on BT’s Wholesale network. This is thanks to the arrival of BT’s now almost forgotten 21CN network. Hundreds of exchanges across the country are now enabled for a service called Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC), which allows BT and its ISP partners to start offering ADSL2+ connections of their own.

Even though many of these exchanges have been WBC-enabled for months, BT and most of its ISP partners have only recently started to connect customers. BT claims that 40% of the country will be offered ADSL2+ by the end of the year. Other ISPs claim it could take longer, with Zen estimating that it might take until the early part of 2010 to complete its migration to ADSL2+.

Unlike some of its ISP partners, who rushed out all guns blazing selling ADSL2+ as “up to 24Mbits/sec”, BT is sensibly moderating expectations by marketing the service as “up to 20Mbits/sec”. Zen Internet is doing likewise, and estimates that the average download speed customers will actually receive is between 9Mbits/sec and 13Mbits/sec.

Even if the speeds aren’t too hot, it shouldn’t cost broadband customers extra. BT, Zen and other ISPs are planning to migrate customers on 8Mbits/sec ADSL Max connections up to the ADSL2+ services for free (provided they’re willing to commit to a new 12-month contract in the case of BT).