BT’s FTTP Trial Promises Fast Fibre Broadband

BT Openreach is set to bring superfast broadband to eight new locations in a fresh ‘Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) on Demand’ trial.

Homes and businesses in the selected areas will be able to order a fibre right to their door, with speeds of up to 330Mbps if they are in a place already served by Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) technology.

In the rest of the country, FTTP on demand is available only in FTTP enabled areas, and BT intends to extend the service across all fibre-enabled areas by Spring 2013.

FTTP favours the few

The pilot will take place in two phases. Phase one is intend to test the planning and construction process and will run from July 2012 to early 2013. Customers in parts of High Wycombe, Bristol South and St Agnes, Cornwall will be able to receive speeds of 330Mbps downstream and either 20Mbps or 30Mbps upstream. Edinburgh Waverley will be added to the trial in September 2012.

The second phase will run from March to May next year and will test the automated order process and focus on the 330Mbps downstream and 30Mbps upstream product. The four test areas from phase one will be included, as will Watford, Cardiff, Basingstoke and Manchester Central.

“FTTP on Demand has great potential and so we are proceeding with these pilots. Whilst we believe FTTC will be our mass market consumer product for some time yet, FTTP may be of interest to small and medium sized businesses and so we want to make it accessible throughout our fibre footprint,” said Mike Galvin, Openreach’s managing director of network investment. “This development can potentially help SMEs to compete both at home and abroad as well as maintain and create jobs across the UK.”

Fibre targets

BT currently provides fibre broadband access to ten million premises and expects to increase this to two thirds of UK premises by the end of 2014. This has been achieved primarily through deployment of FTTC technology, and yesterday BT announced that it was adding another 98 such exchanges to its network, bringing another 800,000 homes and businesses to its reach.

BT currently provides FTTP in 15 exchange areas and has investigated the possibility of extending it to blocks of flats.

However last week, BT customers across London and the Southeast were unable to receive Internat access after a major service outage.

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