Telecoms provider BT is accelerating its fibre broadband rollout. It now plans to offer "super-fast" internet speeds to two-thirds of UK premises by the end of 2014. The target is a year ahead of its original plan. The firm says its main product will offer maximum download speeds about 10 times faster than at present, at 70-100Mbps on average. That will help it compete against Virgin Media's 100Mbps offer. BT says it is employing an additional 520 engineers and bringing forward £300m of investment to achieve the goal. The company says six million premises already have access to its fibre broadband technology, about 25% of the total. It aims to increase that to about 10 million properties, or about 40% of those in the UK, by the end of next year. "Our rollout of fibre broadband is one of the fastest in the world and so it is great to be ahead of what was an already challenging schedule," said BT's chief executive Ian Livingston. Global position A recent report suggested the UK ranked 25th in the world in terms of average broadband connection speeds. Akamai's State of the Internet Report said the average UK connection speed was 5Mbps compared to the Netherlands' 8.5Mbps and South Korea's 13.8Mbps. "For a long time people thought the UK was on a low-fibre diet and it was taking us a long time compared to everyone else," said Matthew Howett, senior analyst at the telecoms consultants Ovum. "These investments are expensive and risky - especially when you don't know if people even want the faster product. But BT has seen demand for its top speeds and that's encouraging them to roll out the fibre more quickly." Speeds of up to 100Mbps will allow households to stream multiple high definition television programmes, music and games at the same time. Experts say most homes will not need such fast speeds for the foreseeable future, however it will help future-proof the network against further developments. Source:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15518887
Well yes that is mostly true but all businesses need these speeds and today they can't buy that speed if they are in the wrong place, or they can buy it if they are willing to pay ridiculous prices. In the late 1990's BT's Kilostream and megastream products cost a fortune, dedicated private circuits used to cost 10 grand a year and more even the Kilostream product was in that sort of price range, Megastream was a lot more expensive. Just for explanation Megastream was a ONE mega bit service At speeds of 100 Mb businesses will be free to divest themselves of expensive onsite backroom computer hardware infrastructure, servers switches, software and management of all this stuff. At 100 Mb they can move all that to the cloud, to be managed by (supposed experts ). Also at 100Mb even bigger companies can become more decentralised with individual branches having little need for supporting hardware other than a router, switch and decent firewall. The company I work for now, went in the last 6 years, from a huge annual phone bill of many many thousands of pounds to a Voice over IP bill that barely pushes 500 quid a year all because of better broadband. As a business they used to have a huge ISDN dial up bill and customers had the expense of their people having to travel to customer sites to install stuff when they could have done it online and of course they now do exactly that, the only people that go onsite now are the training guys. So faster roll-out of FTTC will be greatly appreciated by businesses all over the country and will open up new business opportunities for communities in remote locations that were previously very isolated. The sad thing is that BT "the monopoly" offered to do this back in the 1980's they wanted a fibre network for the UK if only the government would let them run entertainment services over it, they had the technical capability to do it back then and the resources. It didn't happen because Maggie vetoed the idea, she wanted to encourage start-up cable companies all of whom installed inferior copper networks and ended up bust or bought out, the legacy of that is the Virgin network now, which has taken decades to get to a decent standard.
Know what you mean -funny how the 2/3rds always excludes most of Wales bar Cardiff and Wrexham. To be fair, I do get 7.5, but that'll be most we'll get for many many years.
