BT is to more than double the number of homes and businesses that will be able to receive it’s fastest FTTH (Fibre To The Home) broadband.
BT’s Fibre To The Home (or Fibre To The Premise as BT call it) will be the fastest broadband BT will offer with speeds up to 100Mb and is to be made available now to 2.5 million premises and not the 1 million as originally planned. The move comes as BT have findings that it is going to cost far less to deploy than they had originally anticipated meaning that even more people will be able to benefit from it.
BT will be deploying Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) elsewhere and the hope is that around 10 million homes and businesses will have a fibre broadband connections by 2012. FTTC is expected to deliver broadband speeds of 40Mb.
BT has cut the costs of FTTH by moving away more from having to dig up roads to using existing underground ducts where copper wires are already running, they are also planning on using telegraph poles to run the fibre optic cables between these, again which takes away the expensive cost of digging up roads.
BT has also updated the speeds and prices that communications providers will pay to use BT’s Generic Ethernet Access over Fibre to the Cabinet (GEA-FTTC) that will deliver broadband at 40Mb download and 10Mb upload, this is an increase from 5Mb upload speeds and won’t cost the providers any more. The wholesale price to the providers is £88.80 per year.