BT will start rolling out fibre
to the cabinet (FTTC) in summer as part of
the £1.5bn network upgrade it announced in July.
The first two pilot exchanges to be upgraded will be Muswell
Hill, London, and Whitchurch, South Glamorgan. The exchanges serve
about 15,000 customers each. BT plans to run a technical trial of
FTTC in the Foxhall exchange area of Kesgrave, Suffolk early next
year.
David Campbell, Openreach's director of next generation access,
said BT will sell fibre-based services to all UK communication
providers on a wholesale basis.
Indicative pricing for the FTTC service is £5-£10 plus VAT above
present telephone services. This will buy transmission speeds of up
to 40mbps for downloads and 15mbps for uploads.
BT earlier installed fibre to the premises (FTTP) as part of the
new-build development at Ebbsfleet Valley in Kent. Pricing there is
£230 per premises plus £36/y rental for a nominal 10mbps download
and 2mbps upload speed.
Virgin Media is presently upgrading its cable TV network to
handle data speeds up to 50mbps. ntl-Telewest, Virgin Media's
business arm, currently offers fibre and copper connections that
range from 4-20mbps for downloads and 0.5-1.0mbps for uploads for
up to £50/month.
Geo, a network operator, is
building
a £30m fibre network in north Wales for the Welsh Assembly. It
should go live early in the new year and offer 10mbps speeds
upstream and down.
A BT spokesman said the trials of 15,000 customers each in
different parts of the country would give the telco "good data" on
the likely interest and uptake among bandwidth resellers such as BT
Retail and internet service providers, and their customers. He said
there was no idea yet of what the average number of end-users per
exchange was likely to be for a national FTTC service.
Campbell said the sites were chosen in consultation with
communications providers and took into account feedback from
regional development agencies, devolved authorities and similar
organisations.
"We also had to take into account current network topology and
our ability to run testing procedures in the chosen areas," he
said. We have a good mix of areas, allowing us to test our products
in both urban and semi-rural environments."
Campbell said BT expected to announce detailed plans for the
initial market deployment of the Openreach product in early
2010.