BT speeds fibre rollout

BT have announced that they are bringing forward their plans to rollout up to 40Mb speeds (with the whole programme costing them £1.5bn) using fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) technology, connecting 1m homes by March 2010 - double their previous forecasted availability.

Head honcho of their Openreach access division Steve Robertson said:

"Fibre is the future and so we're speeding up the pace of our plans.

BT has invested billions in creating Broadband Britain yet it has done so whilst offering others equal access to its network – demonstrating once again that competition doesn't have to be a barrier to investment."

The second sentence is clearly a dig against Virgin Media, who will have up to 50Mb speeds available across their whole network by the end of this summer.

In a statement in response, Virgin Media said:

"Virgin Media already offers the fastest broadband in the country with our ultra-fast 50Mb service.

By the end of this summer we will have completed our next generation roll out to 12.5m homes and we're already piloting 200Mb.

We've been saying for years that fibre optic broadband is the future."

BT are expecting to have their 40Mb speeds available to 40% of the country by 2012, whereas Virgin's network covers approximately half of the country.

Analysts believe that it would cost BT approximately £3bn to rollout FTTC to 90% of the country, and the telco has made it clear that they believe there is "no commercial case" for the additional spend to extend FTTC availability beyond 50% of the country.