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
Conor McDermott said: bt hve to drop fttc that is not proper fiber broadband they are going to be told to go full fiber on all lines and copper broadband not exisit by 2016 that means no copper wire any where on there lines because ultra hd is coming and ps4 needs 160meg min
Spear_3108 said: how can people watch hd streaming as its a p2p system and on unlimited thats the only thing that is capped slow down
Kevin Robinson said: Magazinesshoud 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 becausethatshow long you have to wait for it
Callean said: Youre 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 Cant answer that
UnKnOWn said: Haha well done BT its not like Virgin has been offering 100MB Broadband for the last year decided to eventually gofibrehave we seriously if BTdidnttell everyone that DSL tech was the way to go so they could use their crappy copper cableinfrastructureand we had followed other counties and fitted country widefibre in the early days like so many otheresWe wouldnt have such a disparity of speed across the uk personally i refuse to live any place thathasntgotfibre 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: philadisqusI 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 areconsistent3c980aa0802c72eb7c905144131ed4f7disqus -Midas refuse to use the word Lord for a whinerStop moaning They offer these services to places where they will recoup the money its called economics They arehardlygoing 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 broadbandHere are super cars Ferrari Aston Martin etc But only those with BMW M3s and Audi RS4s can have it All those with Fiesta Diesels dont 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 getI can see it now a phone call to BT a month after take-up saying that youre only getting 1Mbps instead of 100Mbps and the response well the contract does say up tooh and in response to infinite88888 with the advent of more and more streaming services I suppose theyre expecting people to watch streaming HD quality content without any delays
infinite88888 said: so what exactly are we supposed to download with these huge speeds and bandwidths