UK incumbent BT has said that it will not upgrade customers with fibre-optic broadband to newer, faster broadband services.
BT is part way through its £2.5bn roll-out of fibre-optic broadband to two thirds of UK households by 2015.
So far, it has been…
UK incumbent BT has said that it will not upgrade customers with fibre-optic broadband to newer, faster broadband services.
BT is part way through its £2.5bn roll-out of fibre-optic broadband to two thirds of UK households by 2015.
So far, it has been supplying FTTC (fibre-to-the-cabinet) broadband, which can achieve speeds of up to 40Mbps.
But it is also currently piloting FTTP (fibre-to-the-premises) broadband, which can achieve much faster speeds, up to 100Mbps. It plans eventually to supply this to 25% of customers, and will start supplying it in the spring.
PC Pro reported on Thursday that BT has decided that it will not return to those customers who have already been provided with FTTC, despite the fact that FTTP is much faster.
A BT spokeswoman told TelecomFinance that FTTC was “more than adequate” to support current and future bandwidth demands.
She said: “We have always said that we would be deploying a mix of the two technologies. FTTP is very expensive and more operationally difficult to deploy than FTTC, but where there is a commercial case for doing so and where the network topology allows, we will choose to deploy FTTP.”
BT revealed in October that it was planning to more than double the number of customers that were to go on FTTP, up to around 2.5million UK homes and businesses by 2012.
The BT statement in October also said that FTTP had the potential to get up to far higher speeds in the future, up to 1Gbps.
