BT fibre upgrades announced at 63 exchanges

BT has unveiled plans for the next stage of its fibre rollout. The rollout will cover some 63 exchanges, many of which are located in the south east of England.

Some exchanges will see old connections fully replaced with fibre-to-the-home lines, with others benefiting from fibre-to-the-cabinet upgrades. The “last mile” on the fibre-to-the-cabinet connections will be made up by existing copper and aluminium wire connections.

The full fibre-to-the-home lines are theoretically possible of delivering 100Mbps download speeds, whilst the fibre-to-the-cabinet connections will provide top speeds of 40Mbps, although The Register reports that average speeds on the latter type of connection will be around 10-20Mbps.

There is no word which of the 63 exchanges will receive which type of fibre connection. Presumably BT will later upgrade the metal wire last mile with fibre-optic lines in the future.

BT has invested £1.5bn for its next-gen fibre optic network. The upgrade will connect 10 million homes to faster speeds by 2012, or 40 per cent of UK households. Out of 10 million, it’s planned that 2.5 million will be connected via fibre-to-the-home. No specific timescale for the upgrades to the 63 exchanges has been announced.

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