BT to offer 20Mbits/sec broadband to 40% of UK this year

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 7 May 2009 at 13:43

BT says it will offer 20Mbits/sec ADSL2+ broadband to 40% of Britain's businesses by the end of the year.

The breakthrough is the long-awaited fruition of BT's 21st Century Network (21CN), with the first ADSL2+ services being switched on by BT Business this summer.

BT's consumer customers should also start to see the higher-speed services arriving this year, as BT attempts to close the yawning gap on cable firm Virgin Media, which is now offering connections of up to 50Mbits/sec.

BT Business says it will contact customers who are connected to a 21CN-enabled exchange and offer them an upgrade to the higher speed service at no extra cost, although they will need to sign a new 12-month contract.

BT says the service will be sold as "up to 20Mbits/sec" broadband even though ADSL2+ does theoretically peak at 24Mbits/sec. "The technology does go a little faster, but after all the tests we've done, we've said let's get a bit of honesty into it," John Strutt, general manager of business voice and broadband products told PC Pro.

The ADSL2+ service will have the same 50:1 contention ratios as today's lines, meaning peak-time speeds are likely to fall significantly short of the stated maximum. Upload speeds will also be boosted to 1Mbit/sec.

Forward to fibre

As the 21CN rollout begins in earnest, BT is also pressing ahead with trials of fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) this summer.

The FTTC service will boost download speeds to up to 40Mbits/sec, although it's the uplink that's likely to see the most significant improvement, with Strutt claiming the trials will test upload speeds of two, five and 10Mbits/sec. "We need to see what the technology can cope with and what happens in terms of the backhaul network," he said.

Strutt said that BT Business will offer both ADSL2+ and fibre to customers, and claimed that the "prices are going to be very close".

Yet, even with FTTC, which won't start rolling out commercially until next year, BT could still be trailing behind its rivals. Virgin Media yesterday announced trials of 200Mbits/sec fibre broadband and suggested it would be targeting small business customers for the first time.

Strutt hinted that BT will be equally capable of bonding connections together to hit such heights. "Our techies are also playing with how they can extend the technology," he said. "It will be interesting to see how much it [Virgin Media] charges. It positions 50 meg as a premium service. Will 100 or 200 be premium plus?"

Ethernet first mile

Moving further up the business chain, BT has begun offering Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) services to small and medium-sized businesses that want reliable, guaranteed bandwidth.

The service uses bonded copper pairs to provide uncontended connections of between 2-10Mbits/sec. The service is symmetrical, meaning upload speeds are the same as the downlink, which BT claims is increasingly important for companies supporting home workers.

"Once people start working from home, you have more outward traffic going over your network, and that's where the symmetrical connection comes into its own," claimed Greg Duffy, from BT Business's networked IT propositions. "It doesn't take too many people to fill up an ordinary broadband connection."

Duffy says the EFM services are also ideal for companies looking to run VoIP or provide guaranteed connectivity between different sites.