UK ISP BT has today furnished us with some fascinating new maps that visualise the coverage of superfast 40-100Mbps fibre optic broadband services around London between now and the spring of 2011, well in advance of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

BT claims that 87% of homes and small businesses in London will be served by exchanges enabled for fibre broadband ( FTTC and FTTH / P ) come Spring 2011. BT has so far revealed a sizeable list of exchanges to be upgraded for summer 2012 (more details); further plans will be revealed in the future.


This is all part of BT's £2.5bn investment to make fibre optic broadband services available to 66% of the UK population by 2015. BT has already started to upgrade the local London network in parts of Muswell Hill, Canonbury, Chingford, Edmonton, Enfield, Thamesmead and Tottenham. 100,000 homes and businesses in these areas now have the option of experiencing super-fast broadband.



BT has also included maps of its existing and future "advanced" copper (24Mbps ADSL2+ etc.) based broadband network coverage in London. More than 90% of households and businesses in Greater London currently have access to speeds of up to 20Mbps, although in terms of real-world performance ADSL2+ technology can be very slow.


BT claims that its new super-fast broadband speeds are "more than enough to run multiple bandwidth-hungry applications at the same time". It uses the example of how "a family could be watching different high definition (HD) movies, while others are gaming or working on complex graphics or video projects".

Indeed that is possible. However most of the initial usage allowances and high prices being peddled by early FTTC ISP adopters suggest that in practice it would be impossible to sustain that for long without incurring significant extra costs. The new technology might be faster and more reliable but many usage allowances simply do not keep up.