BT launches its 24Mbit broadband service over
its21st
century network (21CN)next week, but small
businesses will have to wait before they see a reduction in cost
for high-speed connections.
From this week, ISPs that use BT Wholesale connections could
offer customers download speeds of up to 24Mbits per second over
the previous 8Mbits per second headline speed, and upload speeds of
up to 1.4Mbits per second from 256Kbits per second, using
Asymmetric
Digital Subscriber Line 2+ (ADSL2+) technology.
BT says it is initially targeting the service at densely
populated areas such as London and Manchester and is committed to
rolling out Wholesale Broadband Connect to every exchange in the UK
by 2011.
But Ian Fogg, research director at Jupiter Research, said ISPs
might only be willing to offer BT's faster ADSL2+ service to
customers if the prices BT charges is lower or equal to the ones it
charges for current broadband connections.
"Businesses are demanding higher broadband speeds but price is
still an issue," said Fogg.
"How the wholesale prices of the ADSL2+ service compares against
old ones will determine how fast ISPs make it available, and, in
turn how affordable it will be for small businesses."
Fogg said that many small businesses still rely on consumer
broadband or standard ADSL products, but that having higher
download and upload speeds could open applications like virtual
private networking - securely connecting to a company network
through the internet - and larger e-mail attachments to them, which
were previously the preserve of larger enterprises.
Although ADSL2+ tehnology is faster, speeds are still affected
by the number of users online and the distance from the
exchange.
The reality is that only a proportion of businesses will get the
higher speeds they are promised under ADLS2+. This limits the
number of customers an ISP could reach with faster broadband and
could dissuade it from offering the service, said Rupert Wood,
principal analyst at research firm Analysys Mason.
He said that in the past, when BT has offered a new wholesale
product, different ISPs have taken up packages at different times
and this could be the case with BT's ADSL2+ service.
"ISPs could take six months to a year to take on new products,
and so there could be a delay between the availability of fast
broadband from BT Wholesale and the avilability to small
businesses."
Wood said previous BT deployments of Symmetric Digital
Subscriber Line (SDSL) services - broadband with equal upload and
download speeds - have had modest uptake for much the same
reasons.
But David Harrington, head of regulatory affairs for the
Communications Management Assocation, which represents network
managers in IT, said that what UK business really need are fibre
optic connections and that ADSL2+ technology will be insufficent
for the future needs of UK firms.
Last year, former competitiveness minister Stephen Timms and the
Broadband Stakeholders Group warned that failure to start a fibre
roll-out within the next two years could see the UK falling behind
other countries' broadband access.