By: MarkJ - 12 January, 2010 (1:45 PM) - Score: 3077 - Fixed Line Broadband

Residents, businesses and politicians living in Norfolk have yet again raised angry voices after BT's latest list of 63 local telephone exchange locations (here), where its new superfast (up to 100Mbps) fibre optic based broadband services will soon become available from, failed to include any in the county.


The news follows several comments in November by the East of England Director for BT , Peter McCarthy-Ward , who warned that the government’s commitment to deliver a minimum broadband speed of 2Mbps to virtually every household in the UK by 2012 (USC) could be missed in Norfolk; it might even take up to five years to deploy, he warned.

BT has so far revealed over 160 initial exchange locations for its fibre optic based broadband services ( FTTH / P and FTTC ), which will offer speeds of up to 100Mbps (FTTC 40Mbps). None have been in Norfolk, though the operator is running a trial of deeply inferior 1Mbps to 2Mbps BET technology at the Wymondham exchange.

To be fair on BT, it's early days yet and the operator cannot be expected to reach everybody within a short period of time. The first generation of ADSL broadband took several years to rollout and there's no reason to expect FTTH/P/C to be any different. Plenty of other places are also raising their voice and yet the commercial rollout has yet to even begin.