NEWS
BT has sped up the rollout of superfast broadband in one of the UK's major cities.
Some areas of Glasgow, which were due to become part of BT's fibre deployment this year, will now find themselves connected up with superfast broadband by the autumn.
The autumn rollout will cover more than 15,500 homes and businesses in the Hillington, Cardonald and Crookston areas of the city, according to the telco.
The city was first earmarked to become part of the fibre deployment in March, when the telco said Glasgow's Halfway and Western exchanges were to be fibre-enabled. The two were joined by the city's Bridgeton and Giffock exchanges in July.
BT plans to cover 1.5 million homes - some 40 per cent of the population - with its fibre network by 2012 at a cost of £1.5bn.
Virgin Media currently covers half the UK population with a hybrid fibre-cable service, capable of download speeds up to 50Mbps. At launch, BT's fibre service will have a maximum downlink of 40Mbps.
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1. anonymous
From www.bt.com/broadband...
Broadband checker results
We have tested your line and can confirm your line supports the UK's most complete broadband package, BT Total Broadband. We estimate your maximum connection speed to be 3.0Mbps. This is the fastest speed your line can support.
If you're an existing BT Total Broadband customer, whilst up to 20Mb will be available in your area, you are already recieving the fastest speed your line can support.
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Nuff said.....
2. Richard Davies
If you get 1Mbps from your existing service it will most likely be caused by poor line conditions in the last leg of the cable run (from green box to the premise).
This means that even if BT layed a 1000Mbps fibre at the exchange, you wouldn't benifit at all! You will still get 1Mbps!
Therefore talking about 40Mbps is nothing more than a pipedream for the majority of people.
A BT engineer told me the other day that the best way of getting there attention with speed problems is to earth the cable somehow! Great!
The bottom line is that this new 21st century network should have been fantastic...it should have set us up for the forseeable future. It doesn't look like it will though...its simply turned into a let down thanks to BT not putting in enough money / effort to make it what it should be. Why did they even bother is what I'm thinking?
Soon we will be like japan where you have to be thankful for 1Mbps!
3. anonymous
What makes you think the broadband checker will report the new speeds prior to launch...?
This information is provided by Openreach and not "BT Retail" so any ISP that provides a speed checker will give the same results.
4. GALLEYSLAVE
This methinks, is a wait and see situation! a long long wait...
5. Michael Dixon
aka UK slowrate narrowband