BT has announced the commercial launch of its 'up to' 100Mbps fibre-to-the-premises broadband service. Exchanges in London and Exeter are the first to get FTTP upgrades. It was previously only available to residents of Milton Keynes via a BT trial.
The fibre-optic broadband service will be available as BT Infinity Option 3. As of today a limited number of suburban London exchanges, plus ones in Chester, York, St Austell and Exeter will be able to deliver the FTTP service. As well as much faster downloads, the fibre-optic broadband service will offer upload speeds of up to 15Mbps.
Exchanges first to get FTTP broadband include Highams Park, Leytonstone, Ilford and Forest Hill in London, Ashford in Middlesex, Chester, York, St. Austell and Exeter. BT plans to roll out the service to more exchanges in the future.
The existing BT Infinity FTTC (fibre-to-the-cabinet) service offering downloads of up to 40Mbps is now accessible to more than 6 million homes and premises. Until now, the FTTP-based service was only available in Milton Keynes, where it was being trialled.
“We are delighted to launch BT Infinity Option 3, which offers our fastest-ever speeds for consumers. We are seeing very encouraging take-up of our fibre-based broadband and we now have more than 300,000 customers,” said John Petter, managing director of BT’s consumer division.
“Today’s addition expands our product offering, so we now have three versions of BT Infinity offering high speeds that allow families to do more online at the same time. BT Infinity Option 3 matches the top speed currently available in the UK and beats the upload speed offered by Virgin Media’s best offering.”
BT recently revealed it will bring superfast fibre broadband to two thirds of the country by 2014, a year earlier than hoped. Under its £2.5bn roll-out BT had originally hoped to reach 66 percent of the UK with its fibre network that offers speeds of 'up-to' 100Mbps through a combination of fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) and Fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) technology by 2015. However the telecoms firm has bought forward some £300m worth of investment which now take place over the next few years and revised the deadline to 2014.
BT Infinity Option 3 costs £35 per month with unlimited evening and weekend calls.
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Comments
Daniel Johnson said: We don't have the lowest speeds of broadband in Europe, the Republic Of Ireland does!
Spear_3108 said: how can people watch hd streaming as it's a p2p system and on unlimited thats the only thing that is capped (slow down)
Kevin Robinson said: Magazines shoud not publish obvious publicity tripe like this. I work in the central of Belfast and cant get any fibre product. BT Infinity, yeah so called because that's how long you have to wait for it.
Callean said: You're quite right. My business broadband is next to un-useable it is so slow. "Sorry you are too far from the exchange" When will I be able to have even 1meg? "Can't answer that".
UnKnOWn said: Haha, well done BT its not like Virgin has been offering 100MB Broadband for the last year..... decided to eventually go fibre have we... seriously if BT didn't tell everyone that DSL tech was the way to go so they could use their crappy copper cable infrastructure and we had followed other counties and fitted country wide fibre in the early days like so many otheres. We wouldnt have such a disparity of speed across the uk... personally i refuse to live any place that hasn't got fibre... which is rather limiting..! Its also BT fault who manipulated the market, and access to infrastructure and small cable companies out of business as they tried to do the best thing possible and fit cable across the country, until eventually there was only 2 really left, by that point investment in infrastructure had long stopped and staying afloat was the main goal.... BT is completely to blame for it all if you ask me...!
Crispin Proctor said: phila I have Virgin 100Mb service and I get 100Mb on most things. I now find it is often the server which cannot keep up. News groups are about the only ones who are consistent.@3c980aa0802c72eb7c905144131ed4f7 @-Midas (refuse to use the word Lord for a whiner)Stop moaning. They offer these services to places where they will recoup the money. it's called economics. They are hardly going to put it into places where there will be a low up-take. Should you not be in school?
Lord Midas said: And once again it seems as if they are offering this service to those who already have super fast broadband."Here are super cars... Ferrari, Aston Martin, etc. But only those with BMW M3s and Audi RS4s can have it. All those with Fiesta Diesels don't get nothing." As usual.
phila said: And with the famed "up to", and the UK having the lowest speeds of broadband in Europe, what sort of speeds to we ACTUALLY expect to get?I can see it now, a phone call to BT a month after take-up, saying that you're only getting 1Mbps instead of 100Mbps and the response "well, the contract does say 'up to'"...oh, and in response to infinite88888, with the advent of more and more streaming services, I suppose they're expecting people to watch streaming HD quality content without any delays