BT Announces Six Race To Infinity Winners

BT has announced that it will extend its Race to Infinity broadband promotion to six winning exchanges, rather than the five originally planned, and may include as many as ten exchanges.

BT’s Race to Infinity campaign was designed to drum up interest in the carrier’s fibre broadband products in rural areas. BT has said it will upgrade the exchanges of the winning areas to receive fibre broadband by early 2012.

Winning exchanges

The winning six exchanges were Baschurch, in Shropshire; Blewbury, in Oxfordshire; Caxton, in Cambridgeshire; Innerleithen, in the Scottish Borders; Madingley, in Cambridgeshire; and Whitchurch, in Hampshire. In those areas 100 percent or even slightly over 100 percent of customers had registered their interest in having fibre broadband brought in.

BT defended the accuracy of the results, saying the results of more than 100 percent were due to inherent difficulties in identifying individual premises in exchange areas.

The company said it used industry-recognised, publicly available data to set the exchange sizes and completed several audits of the votes cast, removing any votes it believed to be invalid or fraudulent.

BT has also said it will “engage with” areas where more than 75 percent of customers voted, without guaranteeing to provide fibre broadband access. In addition to the winning exchanges, Marton in Warwickshire and Capel in Surrey also registered more than 75 percent of votes.

Overall, 23 communities passed the 1,000 votes needed to be considered in the scheme.

High levels of interest

BT said that the high levels of interest reflected the efforts by campaigners across the country.

The company said it might add the top ten winners to its deployment list, and will make a decision about this by the end of January.

BT has set up partnerships in Northern Ireland and Cornwall to deliver fibre to rural areas. And the government has said it would make £530 million available to help companies reach other rural areas.

BT spokesmen at a recent fibre demonstration also reiterated its claim that the rollout of its fibre network, which will be open to all other communication providers, is one of the fastest in the world. It stated that its network passes the equivalent of the population of Singapore every quarter.

BT has said more than two million premises now have access to fibre broadband. That number will increase to four million by the end of 2010, with BT planning to pass 10 million premises in 2012, and two-thirds of UK premises (approx 16.5 million premises) in 2015.