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BT announces first fibre broadband prices

By Barry Collins

Posted on 21 Jan 2010 at 11:41

BT Retail will start selling up to 40Mbits/sec fibre broadband from £20 per month, the company has announced.

The company will offer two packages to customers: the £20 per month deal will see upload speeds limited to up to 2Mbits/sec and will impose a 20GB monthly download cap. It also attracts a £50 connection charge.

The £25 per month deal abolishes the connection charge and the data cap, and raises the maximum upload speed to a relatively impressive 10Mbits/sec.

BT has been trialling the technology in Muswell Hill, Whitchurch and Glasgow Halfway, and the company expects to add a further four million fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) homes and businesses by the end of December 2010, rising to 10 million by mid 2012.

According to BT, 25% of these homes will also be offered the much faster fibre-to-the-premise technology, with potential speeds of up to 100Mbits/sec.

The fibre lines will be rolled out alongside BT's ADSL services, including the up to 20Mbits/sec ADSL2+ and the standard up to 8Mbits/sec ADSL Max.

The company is dubbing the fibre service BT Infinity, and claims it will be pitched at multiple PC households or those looking to stream HD video content.

BT does, of course, offer its own internet television-on-demand service, BT Vision, which has so far failed to meet the company's initial lofty sales expectations.

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User comments

Not bad

Not a bad price really, the 10Mbit upload is really the seller though. It makes things like Microsoft Skydrive and other on-line storage companies much more viable for home users.

By JStairmand on 21 Jan 2010

The £25 price and 10 MBit upload are very tempting. The only problem is BT possible use of Phorm. That is a complete killer for me. Until BT kill off Phorm then it is a no no for me, and I suspect many others.

By Amnesia10 on 21 Jan 2010

I agree... but I just KNOW it won't reach my exchange till 2020..:)

By pinero50 on 21 Jan 2010

Upload... pah!

They an keep their upload speeds. I have the BT Homehub 2 and found that if you upload large files (e.g. to Flickr) when not downloading at the same time the hub reboots! I've been told 'its being fixed', 'its a security feature', etc.

By pveater on 21 Jan 2010

I just about to upgrade to 20MB via Virgin cable...so BT eat my dust

I could only get 3.4 MB ave and 6.4 on a good day via BT.

Mark

By mprltd on 21 Jan 2010

They can talk about 10Mb this and 20Mb that all they want but when ISPs still limit their traffic at peak times it means nothing.

The issue is when you try and do things at peak hours such as 8pm like when I was downloading a 50Mb file from the Microsoft website last night at this time it done so at 30Kbps and this was on a 10Mb Virgin cable circuit.

By a_byrne22 on 21 Jan 2010

20GB limit is useless. How many HD movies will you get for that?

By TimoGunt on 21 Jan 2010

£25 bring on please BT :)

I'd pay £25pm for uncapped useage with 10Mbit uploads... Bring it on! Please, I want it.. I do also run a business, so this would be perfect!

By treadmill on 21 Jan 2010

Exchange

So, any news BT about upgrading the Banbury exchange and my cabinet? :)

By treadmill on 21 Jan 2010

Will this infrastructure be available for other suppliers?

Will this infrastructure be available for other suppliers?

ie. Will we be able to get this on wholesale connections, being as many people currently get their web connection through a BT line from another company like PlusNet or BeThere.

If so, I'd be looking at Be for this, as I'm sure they'd undercut BT's price (they don't offer 'technical support' that caters for idiots. If you phone up, you're expected to hold a technical discussion with a proper technician/engineer. Suits people like us down to the ground.)

By GlasgowGuy on 21 Jan 2010

@Amnesia10: Phorm was killed by BT ages ago...

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/260032/phorm-shares-pl
ummet-as-bt-puts-webwise-on-ice

By draeburn on 21 Jan 2010

OK. AS I'm looking at working from home over the next few weeks I'd jump at this. How do we find out if we can get it?

By bubbles16 on 22 Jan 2010

Virgin

@mprltd Mark, good for you, but wait till you experience their customer service. I predict a riot.

By gavmeister on 22 Jan 2010

@ GlasgowGuy re: Be

Not sure about that - when Be sales massively over-sbscribed our local exchange just in time for all the students starting Uni in September/October 2008, everyone, regardless of how technical their initial help request was, got a 'Please try another microfilter. Please turn off your router for 15 minutes then turn it on. Please make sure you aren't running a Large Hadron Collider in the next room" responses.

Be technical support - at any level - refused to acknowledge that this was an issue on several exchanges down in Kent for well over 3 months - telling several thousand customers that their sudden and concurrent downgrading to sub 100k connections were all their fault.

So I'm more than ready to jump off the Be ship and go to BT if this becomes available in the next 12 months. Otherwise, it's WiMax for me!

By bioreit on 22 Jan 2010

@ GlasgowGuy re: Be

By bioreit on 22 Jan 2010

WEll, it's not just Be who do this, but most broadband providers. I think partly to protect themselves and partly to sort the majority of non technical users.

Yes, it is frustrating. Even more so when they kept insisting on doing this self same thing each time you call.

If it's any issue, Be are much better than Pipex or, Tiscali as they are now. They're utter rubbish and seem intent on distraction, diversion and annoyance when the problem was very definitely at the exchange.

By bubbles16 on 24 Jan 2010

Be

I find Be support perfectly fine if you email them (or post on the forum) with a well written email explaining what you have done to troubleshoot to this point (making sure you let them know that you DO know what you are talking about)
I've always had a response in minutes.

By spotta on 28 Jan 2010

Sky broadband on BT line

I get Sky TV and pay an extra £5 per month for broadband. This gets me 7 to 10Mbps on a BT line which I find suits me. I left Virgin after poor service and too many clashes with their support which showed a complete ignorance of their own system. They always blamed my equipment though a wait of hours or days until they sorted their equipment would eventually cure the problem.

By misceng on 28 Jan 2010

re - Virgin

I work for an IT support company and have wasted days of my life calling BT support to try and resolve line faults for our customers. BT will use any and every excuse to deny any liability, trying to get them to accept that there is even a very simple and obvious line fault is a nightmare. In comparison I have Virgin broadband at home and although far from fast and efficient I have found there support far easier to deal with. My dealings with Virgin have been few and so I may have been lucky, but my dealings with BT are invariably extremely painful.

By djenkins14 on 28 Jan 2010

The speeds BT are offering on their new fibre optic sounds very appealing but, so far my experience with BT hasn't been good, p2p is blocked virtually all day and only released at midnight, if they deem you to be a heavy user they limit your speed throughout the day to whatever they feel like.

I'm currently on 8Mb/s adsl but frequently only get 1Mb/s speeds. If these same rules are going to be applied to their fibre optic service i certainly won't be going anywhere near it.

I was a virgin fibre optic customer for 2 years and only had a few problems in that time with no internet for an hour or two, but all other times i had maximum speed all day long, i was paying for the 10Mb/s service and got the full 10Mb/s.
Unlike BT where the hub crashes at least once a week and my speeds vary dramatically day to day.

The only reason i left virgin was because i moved house and there isn't a fibre optic service in my area at the moment.

By Battletiger on 28 Jan 2010

re - Virgin

I can't say I've had any problems with a BT line since I swapped the hub out for a decent DrayTek router. The phrase you get what you pay for seems to apply with supplier provided routers.

The P2P throttling is irritating though, upload throttling I could understand, but the download limiting is pointless if I'm allowed to use that same bandwidth on another protocol anyway.

By bradfirj92 on 28 Jan 2010

Virgin v BT Cable?

I left Bt over 10 years ago, when they told me I would have to pay £500 to have a new cable to my home. It turned out that when they put the pole in the ground they put it on top of the cables. DUH.

I changed eventually to Virgin (via NTL) who I have been with for 8 years. The only problem was arranging a house move, but I got their attention when I treatened to change supplier. Have recently changed to the 20MBit package to get the FREE Wirelss N router, which works perfectly throughou the house & garden. I can even pick it up with my mobile 5 doors down the road.
As for download speeds just tried 2 local which returned Coventry & Birmingham 7.5, Maidenhead 8.6 & Milton Keynes 22.6 on VMXL service
So always try several tests in different locations,

By bigluap on 28 Jan 2010

20 meg Yeah right

I live in a rural location and have yet to see 2meg( the minimum to receive BT Vision)never mind the dizzy heights of 5. BT need to uprate the infrastructure. And dont get me started on the Broadband Tax.

By ggoodey on 29 Jan 2010

re: ggoodey

You're in a rural area, this is precisely where ADSL fails, it has rapid drop off over distance, it's totally pushing the limits of copper cable. You're not likely to be suffering from oversubscription due to low population density out there.

Going to Fibre IS upgrading the infrastructure, you can't just replace the cable and leave everything else the same. It's capable of the same speeds in both directions and doesn't suffer the same terrible drop off as ADSL at all.

If you can get a fibre line then the hardware would be capable of the top speeds wherever you were, it would only be limited by BT price-band crippling, or over-subscription in dense areas.

By Yakumo_unr on 29 Jan 2010