// Home / News / Broadband

BT boosts ADSL uploads... at the expense of downloads

By Barry Collins

Posted on 4 Aug 2010 at 09:29

BT is offering its ADSL customers the chance to sacrifice some of their download speed to boost their uploads.

Dubbed Annex M, the upload speed boost is primarily aimed at small businesses and professionals who require greater upload speeds for home working and services such as VoIP and video conferencing.

Annex M is only available to customers on ADSL2+ lines who are connected to BT's 21CN network. The company claims Annex M will boost upload speeds by between 200Kbit/sec and 1Mbit/sec by sacrificing 10-15% of the line’s downstream bandwidth.

In tests conducted by BT partner Entanet, upload speeds exceeded 2.5Mbits/sec for those living closest to the exchange, dropping to around 1Mbits/sec for those further afield.

BT claims customers "can be sure of an upstream IP throughput of 85% of the line’s synchronisation speed [the maximum speed available on a particular line] every working day", by which it means 8am to 5pm Monday to Friday.

However, Annex M is only suitable for lines with attenuation of less than 45db, meaning those already suffering from lowly speeds on the fringes of telephone exchanges are unlikely to benefit. BT estimates that around 60% of ADSL2+ customers will be able to use Annex M.

Annex M will be offered by BT and its ISP partners from this week. BT charges ISPs an extra £7 per customer for the service.

BT is by no means the first company to experiment with the technology. Several local loop unbundled (LLU) ISPs have been offering Annex M for some time.

Subscribe to PC Pro magazine. We'll give you 3 issues for £1 plus a free gift - click here

From around the web

User comments

Improved upload speeds for cable?

When is Virgin Media going to realise that their customers also want improved upload speeds?

By JohnGray7581 on 4 Aug 2010

Headline issue

The problem is that the whole broadband industry has headlined download speed -because for web browsing traffic is seriously asymmetric.
Now we all want to upload photo's, use skype and get "stuff" -aka pirated content - with bittorent the upload limitations have become more serious.

By milliganp on 4 Aug 2010

I'd just like to take advantage of remote backup services. I thought I'd have a go at uploading some of my photos to SkyDrive, but gave up after 24 hours of uploading. It would have taken months to complete.

By renhoek on 4 Aug 2010

Improved upload speeds for cable?

JohnGray7581 They are already testing 10MB upload.

By urmaster on 5 Aug 2010

BT don't seem to actually know about this...

I emailed BT with regards to availability there response was:

"Annex-M is available on all lines which are enabled for ADSL2+, which I can see your is. However, we, as an ISP, do not offer any packages with Annex-M. I also cannot recommend any providers whom do offer this."

By ricksters on 20 Aug 2010

Leave a comment

You need to Login or Register to comment.