By Jo Best, 9 July 2009 14:12
NEWS
BT has revealed the towns and cities which will get high-speed fibre broadband in the second stage of its £1.5bn rollout.
The rollout of fibre - whose high speeds are expected to enable a new range of online business and consumer services - is widely regarded as the next major battle between broadband providers. BT's current rollout pits it against Virgin Media, which covers 50 per cent of the country with its own fibre deployment, for future dominance of the UK's broadband market.
Almost 70 exchanges have been named to receive fibre broadband, using a mixture of fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) and fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC).
The more expensive option, FTTP, could theoretically bring downstream speeds of up to 100Mbps and upstream speeds of 40Mbps. The less costly FTTC could deliver downstream speeds of up to 40Mbps and an uplink of between 5Mbps and 10Mbps.
Earlier this year BT named the first set of 29 exchanges destined to be upgraded to fibre, covering some 500,000 homes and businesses.
Today's announcement of a further 69 exchanges will put faster broadband within the reach of an additional 1.5 million homes, set to be fibre-enabled by summer next year.
The telco has already fibre-enabled the north London suburb of Muswell Hill and the Cardiff suburb of Whitchurch, it announced this week.
The fibre deployment is part of BT's plan to eventually cover 40 per cent of the UK population with fibre access by 2012.
However, the government believes a significant proportion of the UK will remain outside fibre coverage without intervention. To that end, as part of the Digital Britain report released last month, the government is proposing a 50p-per-month levy on all broadband lines in order to fund next-generation deployments to areas that would otherwise remain unserved by the market.
BT recently cast doubt on the ability of the 50p tax to bring fibre to 100 per cent of the population, saying it expects to see a fifth of the population without high-speed services.
To find out if your nearest exchange is set to be upgraded, click here for a list of the 69 locations named by BT today
Comments
There are 8 comments. Join the discussion
1. Pybe
Well I belive it when I see it, which will be never round here (Newhaven, East Sussex). We dont even get channel 5 let alone freeview. Arse end of the world.
2. karen challinor
not anytime soon apparently, I appear to be on the wrong side of the peaks as well as the wrong side of Watford
3. Richard Davies
We probably won't get it for a while as they are only just starting to market a new 10Mb POP in Scarborough!
It seems were better off than east sussex though!
This idea of tax though is still ridiculous...BT should get the money from a bank...not tax payers. I say this because it will be someone like BT that creams off future profits.
4. Fred
Still waiting for SDSL to arrive... Why dont they upgrade the areas with worst services first..
5. anonymous
"Is BT's super-fast broadband coming to your neighbourhood?"
Err, No.
6. anonymous
About time. Virgin Media has been sitting on the wall for too long by not extending its fibre network. Now the competition begins...
All houses in my town have Virgin Fibre optic broadband, but I live on an estate of 2000+ houses which was built in 2001. All older houses around the estate have Virgin Fibre optic, but the new estate does not. Virgin could easily extend their fibre to the estate but has not done this.
So we have the limited choice of BT for phones or Sky for TV.
7. whatthefuck
I live in north yorkshire and i live about 15 miles away from middlesbrough which has had fibre optic for about 7 years or more. Why dont virgin expand? And why dont bt put fibre optic in areas where there isnt fibre optic. Theres big towns like Scarborough northallerton thirsk richmond darlington.
8. chris6273
Because being as selfish as they are, they see that they will make more profit upgrading cities than us. I live in the South West which, in my opinion, is one of the worst places in the UK for broadband. The thing that does make me laugh is it will cost probably over 10-40x more money to 'dig' up pavements in cities than villiages like where i live. I agree, they should do us first. We have waited for it and deserve it.