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BT reveals first locations to get 40Mbps broadband

BT has today revealed the first set of locations to get super-fast fibre-optic broadband services.

In early 2010, FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) services will be rolled out to 29 telephone exchanges in areas of Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, as well as two rural locations – Calder Valley in West Yorkshire and Taffs Well near Cardiff.  BT hopes to learn lessons from deploying in the two rural locations.

The fibre-deployment is part of BT’s plan to provide around 10 million premises with access to fibre-based broadband services offering speeds up to 40Mbps.  BT Group’s Openreach division is responsible for delivering the FTTC services.

FTTC technology involves installing fibre-optic cable between local exchanges to local BT street cabinets. Currently, ADSL technologies used by Openreach cannot provides such high broadband speeds as the transmission speeds degrade over distance with the current copper-wire transmission. By replacing some of that with fibre-optic cable, and only using copper-wire between the street cabinet and the premises, it can provide download speeds of up to 40Mbps and upstream speeds of up to 10Mbps.

However, it will not be possible to serve all premises with this technology and BT says it is currently looking at alternative solutions for this.

BT’s FTTC services are due to be piloted this summer in Muswell Hill, London and Whitchurch and Wales before commencing the wider roll-out.