The UK needs to increase it’s roll out of true Fibre To The Home (FTTH) broadband as we are lagging behind the rest of the world.
The call for the UK and the rest of the EU to roll out 100Mb fibre broadband connections direct to the home (FTTH) came from Hartwig Tauber, the director general of the FTTH Council.
To push the point home of the UK’s lack of ambition he pointed to the fact that last summer Japan were pushing for everyone there to have a minimum 1Gb fibre broadband connection, while over in the UK our government said they wanted there to be a minimum 2Mb broadband connection for everyone in the country, this is 500 times small than the target Japan has set!
The FFTH Council did acknowledge the EU’s target of making sure everyone within the EU would have broadband access by 2013 and that by 2020 there should be a minimum 30Mb broadband connection, although upload speeds and also minimum speeds was still unclear as many “up to” speeds don’t actually guarantee users will actually receive this broadband speed.
In the UK there are currently only 5,000 homes that have full Fibre To The Home connections and across Europe this totals around 2.5 million. However, in comparison to the Far East where fibre broadband is much more widespread there are around 38 million people who are connected with fibre directly to their premises.
There was also a slight dig made at the FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) installations that BT are installing, this is where the fibre is taken to the street side cabinet then VDSL2 technology is used via the existing copper network to take the broadband to the home, this results in slower broadband speeds than full fibre, with BT offering up to 40Mb broadband connections via this type of installation.
Tauber said this on the issue:
“The applications that people will want in the future, such as being able to download HD movies, will need faster speeds. An HD video of 20GB would take five hours to download on VDSL speeds of 10Mbit/s, but just 30 minutes on fibre of 100Mbit/s.“
The trial is available to business customers who are in the Glasgow Halfway area and will allow these business to trial the FTTC which will offer them broadband download speeds of up to 40Mb and upload speeds of 2Mb. The trial will run until the start of April 2010.