BT has revealed plans to more than double the the number of
homes that will recieve high speed broadband.
The company plans to deliver speeds of up to 100Mbps to around
1.5 million UK homes and businesses using fibre-to-the-premises
(FTTP) technology by summer 2010.
BT said it could accelerate broadband speeds to up to 1Gbps if
there is a paying demand for it.
The wider availability of FTTP services will help the UK to
climb the broadband speed tables, BT said. Its
decison to roll out faster copper broadband, which offers
speeds up to 24Mb/s, to 75% of UK homes will also have a beneficial
impact, it said.
BT had planned to roll out FTTP to approximately one million
premises as part of an overall plan to reach around 10 million
homes with fibre by 2012. Other premises would have
fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) delivering initial speeds of up to
40Mbps.
But BT said it will now deploy FTTP in some areas where copper
services are already available. This represents a broadening of
BT's strategy as initially FTTP was to be deployed in new build
sites only, BT said.
BT said its financial performance was "ahead of target". This
has allowed it to expand FTTP availability within its overall
investment of £1.5 billion.
BT said it was keen to deploy fibre more widely but wanted
government money to do it. BT Openreach CEO Steve Robertson said
the move was in response to service providers' demand for more
FTTP. Openreach resells BT's network capacity to other network
providers. In August it
outsourced maintenance of its local access ("last mile")
networks to Carillion for £1bn.'
Earlier this week
Cisco reported that the UK had slipped down the world broadband
leader board, and the UK doesn't even appear on the
FTTH Council's list of nations that have just 1% of fibre to
the home. Japan, which took a decision to put every home on fibre a
decade ago, will complete its project this year, but not before
South Korea, the FTTH Council said.