NEWS
BT has given details of a planned fibre deployment in the Thames Gateway regeneration region - its first use of fibre to hook up homes in the UK.
Instead of laying traditional copper cabling to the buildings planned for the 1,000 acre development area in Ebbsfleet Valley, Kent, the telco will put in fibre cabling which can support data speeds of up to 100Mbps - aka very fat pipes indeed.
Around 10,000 homes will be built at the Ebbsfleet Valley development, along with six million square feet of commercial space and three million square feet of retail, leisure and community facilities.
BT Openreach, the telco's local access network business, said the fibre will be available from August and access will be offered on a wholesale basis to all UK communication providers.
Steve Robertson, chief executive of Openreach, said the fibre deployment will enable comms providers to gauge how much demand there is for "very high speed broadband" - and develop business models accordingly.
BT said it would like to make greater use of fibre for hooking up suitable new build sites - but said this investment depends upon an agreement with Ofcom which is currently consulting about the best regulatory framework for future fibre deployment.
The average fat pipe speed in the UK is just 3.6Mbps, according to price comparison website uSwitch - which means Blighty lags behind near neighbour France, where it says average speeds are 17.6Mbps.
Asia Pacific, including countries such as South Korea where fibre deployments are more widespread, offers broadband services with the highest average speeds in the world, according to analyst Point Topic.
Comments
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1. anonymous
Misleading stuff? The contended rate for domestic users in Ebbsfleet will be only 10Mbps down and 2Mbps up. Hardy "super-speed"! Also, the architecture is GPON - FTTC, not FTTH, so the opportunities for open competition are somewhat restricted (each home will be able to access only two SPs at a time).
And it's interesting that "The average fat pipe speed in the UK is just 3.6Mbps, according to price comparison website uSwitch". Ofcom claims (in its recent consultation on fibre access) that the average speed is 4.6Mbps - which suggests that an awful lot of us are getting far more than that!
When are we going to get some reliable stats on broadband, rather than smoke and mirrors?
2. Simon
"... to gauge how much demand there is for "very high speed broadband" ..."
The demand is there alright - to misquote from a certain film, "if BT build it, they will come". Unless they totally cock up the pricing of course !
Of course, no mention of contention ratios, committed rates, nor of congestion in the ISPs backhaul which I believe are far more important that the 'headline' rates.
3. Jon Pennycook
Virgin Media ought to be rolling-out 50Mbps to cable customers this year I think...