It seems as thought south-west England is set to become the UK’s favourite testing ground for next-gen cable deployment.
Yesterday it was revealed that BT are preparing to have set up Fibre to the Home (FTTH) connections to 10,000 new houses currently being built at Ebbsfleet in Kent. The pilot scheme is due to be completed by the beginning of August, and will offer customers maximum connection speeds of up to 100Mbps.
BT will be trialling five different services as part of their ‘Generic Ethernet Access’ scheme, offering download speeds of 135 Kbps and 500Kbps, 10Mbps and 30 Mbps as well as the maximum 100Mbps.
Whilst the first three speeds don’t sound particularly impressive, these are speeds are ‘assured’ rather than ‘up to’ – BT are practically guaranteeing at least this amount. The other two speeds come with the traditional ‘up to’ epithet. The 30Mbps and 100Mbps however, come with an ‘assured’ base rate of 10Mbps, and as such, are listed as ‘add-ons’ to the 10Mbps service on the Openreach PDF. Additionally, there’s not even so much of a whisper or hint or suggestion of anything that could even be remotely construed as relating to traffic shaping or an FUP in the whole document.
The cost for this slice of the future isn’t cheap though. The top 100Mb service costs £530 for 12 months, and comes with a £130 connection charge – this works out at £55 a month. Obviously these prices are for the pilot scheme and they don’t necessarily reflect the cost of 100Mbps broadband when it becomes available across the rest of the country.
In other fibre-trial news, French defence engineering group Thales, along with Eclipse owners Kingston Communications, have been tipped to begin work on setting up a new fibre network in South Yorkshire, thought to be capable of supplying over 600,000 homes with broadband speeds of up to 50Mbps. Virgin Media, have also been trialling cable in Kent, as well as Dover and Folkstone since October 2007.
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alan dalus said on 11 Jan 2008 at 10:40 am #
Actually, I can imagine 100Mbps costing around £50 a month when it gets launched. And BT almost definetly will not roll out a nationwide cable network, depsite 21stCN. They got their network chopped up by Piss-Offcom once, it’d probably happen again.
Why should any company invest in a big network only to see it get sold off to second-rate parasites like sodding Talk Talk?
(In case you were wondering, I’m very much an ex-Talk Talk customer!)