BT Broadband: Next-Gen fibre optic rollout is underway

BT has begun rolling out its next-gen fibre optic network in Muswell Hill in London, and in the Whitchurch area of Cardiff.

Roughly 15,000 properties are covered in each of the regions, and rival providers such as O2, Sky and TalkTalk are also reportedly taking part in the trials. We expect that this is to see whether or not BT could adopt an Openreach style platform with their new network.

BT expects to have up to 29 exchanges enabled with Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) technology by 2010, and to be providing fibre connections to 40 per cent of the population by 2012. Internal trials of the technology reportedly saw BT able to achieve download speeds of up to 40Mbps.

In addition to this, BT has also begun trials of Fibre to the Home (FTTH) services, which offer speeds of up to 100Mbps at a housing development in Ebbsfleet in Kent. A separate trial of this FTTH technology is set to take place in March 2010, and is said to cover some 40,000 UK homes.

With FTTC, a single cluster of fibre connections runs to a cabinet or node, which serves an entire neighbourhood. Individual homes connect to the cabinet using traditional copper coaxial cables. FTTH by contrast takes the cable connection all the way into the house of the subscriber — the crucial ‘last mile’ from the cabinet to the consumer.

It is possible that following the trials of both FTTC and FTTH, BT may opt for a two tier approach to nationwide rollout. We may see a wide-scale rollout of FTTC first of all, with the coaxial connections later replaced with fibre-optic ones, allowing for faster speeds.

Source: ZDNet

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