BT: Super-Fast Broadband Will Change Business

A million people should be able to get super-fast broadband in spring, and 1.5 million by summer, with forty percent of the population covered by 2012, but it’s not yet clear exactly which exchanges will have it. “In this phase, we need some insight into the sort of customers who want superfast, and who will pay a premium for it,” says Dr Whitley. “When the providers decide how to price the service, will be the acid test.”

Registrations are brisk in the trials – perhaps understandably given that the trialists in Cardiff, Muswell Hill and Glasgow get super-fast as a free upgrade. “We’re delighted with the way it’s going,” says Whitley. “Although it’s effectively free, it does involve an engineer visiting your home and getting a box installed.”

Fibre to the Premises

Beyond that, BT is offering fibre to the premises – cutting the cost of the network connections used by the biggest companies. This uses passive optical networking (PON) in the customer’s building, to give downstream speeds of around 100Mbps, and potentially even higher.

This started with a trial in Ebbsfleet since September 2008, effectively a greenfield site in the new town built by the cross-channel rail-link in Kent. Now it is being extended to “browfield” sites, upgrading existing services: the first of these is Highams Park in London

“We’re learning here,” says Whitley. “We are overlaying existing services, and what we learn will underpin our models as we get to larger scale rollouts, and develop a balance between FTTP and FTTC.”

Broadband Britain and the battle with Virgin

The government is planning a fund for super-fast broadband, paid for with a £6-a-year levy on all broadband lines, but no one knows quite how it will be administered, especially given concern over whether European law would allow it.

“At the moment, it’s unclear how it is going to work, and unclear how the money would be allocated,” says Whitley. The fund could raise around £1 billion, which he says is “a material amount of money.”

The levy money will have to be administered by a new body – the network design and procurement group – which has not had a managing drector appointed yet. “There are umpteen models, and until we get some clarity, we can’t comment,” he says.

It seems likely that the fund will be targetted on those beyond the easy first stage of super-fast roll-out. And it will also have to be shared between BT and its big rival Virgin, whose DOCSIS cable-Internet plan will also deliver super-fast broadband, says Whitley: “In the ensuing battle between us and Virgin, we think our system can outdo what DOCSIS can do. They’ll give us a run for our money, but we think our upstream ability will give us an edge over the cable infrastructure.”

Virgin is planning to roll out services to 50 percent of the population, and BT has announced plans for 40 percent. The two overlap quite heavily, leaving around 40 percent to cover.

However the super-fast connections arrive, they seem likely to change the way businesses think about the web, and will very likely drive a new move to put services and interactions online.