BT Group has confirmed that the first official commercial rollout of its future fibre optic based 'up to' 40Mbps+ Fibre to the Cabinet ( FTTC ) broadband services will begin in January 2010. The operator hopes to bring the service within reach of 1.5m UK homes and businesses by early summer 2010, rising to 10m (40% of the population) or more by 2012 and at a cost of £1.5bn.

The confirmation came as part of a CBR interview with Bill Murphy, MD for BT Business. Previously BT had only hinted that the rollout would begin during "early next year" and had decline to elaborate on a more specific timeline. No final pricing details have been released, although they are not expected to be vastly different from current levels (when taken at similar speeds).


Presently BT is still busy with several pilot schemes of the new service in areas such as Muswell Hill (London) and Whitchurch, although it has already revealed which exchanges will be among the first to receive its new superfast service (here and here).

FTTC essentially replaces the copper wire going to local street cabinets from an exchange with a high capacity fibre optic link. The VDSL2 technology is then used to carry connections over an existing (last mile) copper wire into homes, working in a faster but not hugely dissimilar way to many existing (ADSL) broadband services.

The service can deliver download speeds of up to 40Mbps with upload speeds expected to be in the region of 10 to 15Mbps. However FTTC is still susceptible to the age old problem of performance slowdown over distance, but most people should still expect to get least 10Mbps for downloading.

Only the smallest portion of exchanges will be deploying Fibre to the Premise ( FTTP ) technology, which delivers true fibre-optic cable from the exchange directly into the customers premise. This can deliver download speeds of up to 100Mbps (40Mbps upstream) and potentially up to 1000Mbps in the future. Sadly FTTP is predominantly for new build locations.