BT Openreach To Offer 110Mbps Broadband

BT’s wholesale arm, Openreach, has unveiled plans to offer a 110Mbps fibre broadband service from March 2011, as part of its ‘Generic Ethernet Access Fibre To The Premises’ portfolio.

According to BT Openreach – the body responsible for ensuring that rival Internet service providers have equal access to BT’s local UK network – the new fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) service will offer peak rate download speeds of 110Mbps, and an upstream capability of 15Mbps. During busy periods, part of the downstream bandwidth capability will be “prioritised”, guaranteeing speeds of at least 20Mbps.

“Communications providers advertising 100Mbps, that’s exactly what consumers are going to get,” a BT spokesperson said in a statement to PC Pro. “You’re going to get 100Mbps, it’s not an ‘up to’ service.”

The service will initially only be available from a limited number of BT exchanges, but the company says other ISPs will be able to rent the lines in order to enable a UK-wide roll out. Rental will cost £258.48 a year, or £157.80 if purchased together with a related copper voice service. There is also a £75 installation charge.

Misleading broadband speeds

Earlier this year, Ofcom admonished ISPs for continuing to advertise speeds which consumers were not able to receive. The regulator revealed that, while the average speed had gone up, the percentage of the advertised speed that was being achieved had actually fallen from 58 percent in 2009 to 45 percent in 2010.

“Differences between headline and actual speeds are often caused by broadband being delivered over copper lines which were originally designed for phone calls,” explained Ofcom, “hence speeds slow down over long and poor quality lines, and because of electrical interference.”

As a result of this, Ofcom tightened up its voluntary Code of Practice, introduced in 2008, intended to push providers to give consumers a more accurate and consistent estimate of the maximum speed they could hope to receive from their connection.

“Actual speeds are often much lower than many of the advertised speeds which makes it essential that consumers are given information which is as accurate as possible at the point of sale,” said Ofcom’s chief executive Ed Richards. “This is what the new Code is designed to deliver.”

UK broadband

Earlier this week, Cisco’s broadband study revealed that the UK is ranked 18th in the world for broadband leadership, based on quality of service and penetration. According to Cisco, while most people in the UK are “comfortably enjoying today’s applications”, with an average download speed of 6.4Mbps, the infrastructure is not yet in place for the “applications of tomorrow” – such as high definition Internet TV and high quality video communications services.

The British government is currently working to improve the state of broadband in UK, both in terms of quality, with investment in fibre technology, and in terms of penetration, with a pledge to get the last remaining 10,000 Brits online by 2015.