BT to offer 300Mbits/sec broadband next year

Getting silly

How much of the Internet can deliver content at this speed? In my own experience, not much.

By PaulOckenden on 5 Oct 2011

And how many PCs can consume content at that speed? My 6 year old Dell desktop can't keep up with my current 35meg connection.

By seagull on 5 Oct 2011

You obviously don't have four people in your house simultaneously surfing, downloading, updating Windows, emailing, playing XBox and watching youtube videos all at the same time.

By cromel on 5 Oct 2011

The usefulness of high bandwidth connections

What about a family using a single connection?

Mum watching Strictly on iPlayer.
Dad watching Sky
Son downloading lurid videos
Daughter playing World of Warcraft
Cousin using Skype
Next door Hijacking for torrents. Wait, scratch that one.

Point being, in an environment with multiple concurrent users, high media content, instant access expectations, and no-one wanting to compromise; higher bandwidths do come in useful.

Even if that bandwidth is used only for 1% of the day (while grabbing the last episode of Dr Who in HD while making a cup of tea), people DO appreciate it.

We're in a me me me now now now society, and what people want drives what companies deliver...

By matbailie on 5 Oct 2011

I'll believe it when I see it.

I had a FTTC box installed right outside my house in March this year. The go live date has moved from end of June, through end of September to end of December at the moment. This is in an area where a number of users get 1.5Mb/s or less on ADSL2+ service.

By d_marchant on 5 Oct 2011

Hiking the frequency = Shorter distance

Unless BT is thinking that they're going to move my house (and several million others) closer to our respective exchanges, this change won't do jack. Higher frequencies mean that the signal degrades quicker. So maybe if you live next door to your exchange this will help, but then again you aren't the one's suffering at the moment with poor connection speeds.
Why can't BT get it into their thick heads, that copper is, and has been a dead technology for (at least) the last 5 years.
Stop flogging the dead horse!!

By _Alex_ on 5 Oct 2011

@_Alex_ - Read the article!

This is for Fibre to the Cabinet, so the frequency is on the last few metres from the street cabinet into your phone socket. It is narrowing the gap between FTTC and FTTP.

By JohnAHind on 5 Oct 2011

@Alex

Um...I don't think BT are entirely unaware of the limitations of copper - the clue might be in the phrase "fiber to the premises"

By khismet on 5 Oct 2011

Yeah yeah yeah

I'll believe it when I see it.

By mrmmm on 5 Oct 2011

Excellent Service

I have been trialling the 100/15 FTTP service for six months now. It has been faultless. I can run three BBC iPlayer HD streams and not notice any difference browsing on my PC.

By Cliffg on 5 Oct 2011

Great! Hmmmm

So rather than spend money upgrading exchanges that are sub-2MB, the few will be zipping along even faster. Somehow that doesn't seem fair :-(

By benmully on 5 Oct 2011

I wish

Pardon my cynicism. I am not easily persuaded by a BT press release.

Where I live some distance from the exchange there are two cables from the exchange to the neighbourhood. One is copper and the other aluminium. I know this because I struck up a conversation with a BT infinity engineer. One of the regular (3 to 4 times a week at least visitors to our cabinet, which is 30 yards away). Connection to one is very slow and the other glacial.

The best we could get until recently (using Zen as our ISP was 3.4). Now that they have built a new Sainsbury's up the road which use the same infrastructure that is now down to about 2.7.

I have no idea when we might get BT fibre but since in the race to infinity we ended up at 1200 and something I hold out no great hope.

We are going to move in a few months time back to a Virgin Cable area (I work from home so the Interweb is vital to me). Regardless of concerns about Virgin customer service at least a modest download didn't take ages.

Anyway I figure BT's 300 Mbits is pie in teh sky for a lot of areas for the foreseeable future.

Bah! Rant over.

By kaneclem on 5 Oct 2011

I wish

Pardon my cynicism. I am not easily persuaded by a BT press release.

Where I live some distance from the exchange there are two cables from the exchange to the neighbourhood. One is copper and the other aluminium. I know this because I struck up a conversation with a BT infinity engineer. One of the regular (3 to 4 times a week at least visitors to our cabinet, which is 30 yards away). Connection to one is very slow and the other glacial.

The best we could get until recently (using Zen as our ISP was 3.4). Now that they have built a new Sainsbury's up the road which use the same infrastructure that is now down to about 2.7.

I have no idea when we might get BT fibre but since in the race to infinity we ended up at 1200 and something I hold out no great hope.

We are going to move in a few months time back to a Virgin Cable area (I work from home so the Interweb is vital to me). Regardless of concerns about Virgin customer service at least a modest download didn't take ages.

Anyway I figure BT's 300 Mbits is pie in teh sky for a lot of areas for the foreseeable future.

Bah! Rant over.

By kaneclem on 5 Oct 2011

Use of faster connections?

As well as the reasons outlined nicely by matbailie above, don't forget contention ratios - that 80Mb/s isn't all going to one property, it'll be divided over several - each likely to be in use at the same time - So next door downloading several Gigabytes of torrents will count as well.

By greemble on 5 Oct 2011

You've got to be kidding

300 Mbps.

The broadband rich and poor gap widens, and it is not as simple as city vs country.

BT are ignoring areas of cities and leaving them in the 1Mbps per second range whilst rolling out upgrade upon upgrade elsewhere.

Who wants to bet those FTTP customers already have cable and FTTC available to them?

By mr_tom on 6 Oct 2011

Singular and plural of premises is premises

"fibre-to-the-premise"?

By cliffxdavis on 6 Oct 2011

BT bumblers

A fibre optic cable runs down the road outside my window. It has done for several years. It only serves one building in the village, and has not been offered up to the rest of us. I sometimes get 0.3 download and 0.15 upload. Isn't technology wonderful?

By quietmole on 6 Oct 2011

BT bumblers

A fibre optic cable runs down the road outside my window. It has done for several years. It only serves one building in the village, and has not been offered up to the rest of us. I sometimes get 0.3 download and 0.15 upload. Isn't technology wonderful?

By quietmole on 6 Oct 2011

real or Marketing Speed ????

On the basis that BT 20Mbits/sec actually delivers on average less than 9Mbits/sec then we might see some actual speed improvement of course another nice excuse for taking more money off everyone who subscribes.

By kelly485 on 6 Oct 2011

Shame on Virgin and BT

How long ago was it that all our pavements were dug up and Fibre-optic cabling laid? Early '90s? And now Virgin owns the fibre-net, how much expansion have they done to stay ahead of the competition, which is inevitably going to move over to Fibre, now copper has reached it's limits? If they had a strategy, it should have been "Lay Fibre-optic everywhere, then lease out bandwidth to other companies". But no, we have a situation where Virgin are not expanding, and BT are building a parallel Fibre-optic network, which will basically cover the same areas as Virgin - still leaving most areas out in the cold. Bravo, you complete numpties! I despair of society - Banks, Politicians and ISP's conspiring to make our lives ever more dreadful.

By Wilbert3 on 6 Oct 2011

St Austell?????

WTF????

By x16gen on 6 Oct 2011

I had to laugh whilst waiting almost half-a-minute for the page to load so that I could read news of 300Mb broadband! I opened a new tab and did a speed test on my supposed broadband connection: ah, 1.45Mb, a good day today! As usual doubt is cast over the likelihood of any improvement in rural areas.

By LesDerbyshire on 6 Oct 2011

Staggie

You guys are all lucky. My connection speed is only 0.49M download and 0.2M upload. I would love even 1M

By gbdma8 on 6 Oct 2011

Staggie

You guys are all lucky. My connection speed is only 0.49M download and 0.2M upload. I would love even 1M

By gbdma8 on 6 Oct 2011

Waste of money

They are just re-laying places that they have already done and not bothering to cover the whole company. I have 0.3 Mbps where I live and the road up ahead has 100 Mbps. Someone needs to sort it out

By do_you_get on 6 Oct 2011

Digital devide

I live 100 yards from the main exchange in Aberdeen and it is headlined as 20Meg but 6 is the best I have ever had, how close do you have to live to get the 20 on-top of the exchange. Then I wanted to start a technology company 6 miles from Niarn a small town in the Highlands of Scotland and 20 miles from Inverness (Britains newest city) the phone line is so pore there that you are lucky to be able to hear what some one is saying on the phone let alone get a broad band signal. so until they decide to improve the signal to 95% of the area of the UK it is as others have said. Small areas of city will have an excellent service the rest can go hang. A friend of mine works for BT and when I asked him about what happened about giving every doctors, chemist & school in the country a high speed broadband? His reply was they did but they didn't say anything about it working.

By andy_macleod on 7 Oct 2011