Information posted on Samknows reveals that BT Wholesale have at last released the schedule for the first 868 exchanges to be activated for Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC), their new 21CN broadband product. The new product will bring ADSL2+ nationwide, but as predicted, rollout may take until 2012 to reach all corners of the UK.
BT’s current timetable sees them aiming to have 82 exchanges enabled by the 30th of April, followed by 540 exchanges by the 18th of November 2008 and 868 by the 19th May 2009.
21CN is expected to take up most of BT’s £3bn budget for investment between 2004 and 2009. Once the rollout is complete, high-speed connections should be universally available across the UK, over both fixed line (a mixture of copper and cable) and wireless (WiMax) links. The upgrade will also see phones as we known them changing; on 21CN every phone will be a VoIP phone; no traditional telephone services will exist.
“This is the most radical strategy of a telco business you will see anywhere in the world. It’s fundamentally based on broadband everywhere,” said Paul Reynolds, chief executive of BT Wholesale. “We will have a single network running multiple services, not multiple networks running multiple services in a complicated way.”
ADSL2+ is capable of doubling the downstream bitrate of ADSL speeds, and it is theoretically possible to achieve top download speeds of 24Mbps. Be Broadband is the most notable exponent of ADSL2+ as are Sky and UK Online, both of which use the Easynet backbone; O2 have also launched their own services following their purchase of the Be network.
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