By: MarkJ - 12 May, 2011 (7:00 AM) - Score: 6924 - Fixed Line Broadband, Statistics

The BT Group has today released its latest financial results to 31st March 2011 (Q1), which reveal that the operator plans to double the speed of its superfast FTTC broadband service to 80Mbps in 2012 and should reach 100Mbps in the future. Meanwhile BT's Retail ISP base has grown by +162,000 net additions (down from +188k in Q4-2010) to reach a total of 5,691,000 broadband subscribers.

As for BT Retail's customer statistics for its newest FTTC (BT Infinity) 'up to' 40Mbps broadband service.. Firstly, to recap, BT Retail had 38,000 Infinity customers 6 months ago and was adding 4,000 new subscribers each week. It now has 144,000 Infinity subscribers and is adding 5,000 per week.

However, BT does reveal that it's so far spent £0.6bn of its £2.5bn fibre rollout budget until 2015. At present its FTTC service is passing 80,000 new premises every week and BT expects to reach 5 Million Homes sometime within the next few weeks, rising to 10 Million by 2012 as originally planned (40% of the country). This is in keeping with BT's timetable of reaching 66% or more of the UK with its FTTC and FTTP broadband services by 2015.


Elsewhere the BT Vision IPTV service (broadband TV) had +30,000 net additions in the quarter (down from +40k in Q4-2010) and their customer base currently stands at 575,000.

BT Financial Summary
• Revenue of £5,055m
• EBITDA of £1,551m
• Profit before tax of £610m
• Earnings per share of 6.2p
• Free cash flow of £619m
• Net debt (year) of £8.816bn
• Consumer ARPU (year) £326 (up £4)

It's interesting to see BT announce a doubling of its FTTC service speeds. The operator confirmed at the end of last year that they'd achieved speeds of up to 70Mbps in "lab tests" (here). Indeed FTTC was originally launched with the intention of pushing its maximum speed up to 60Mbps "in the future".

Since then there have been a significant number of new developments in FTTC and DSL technology, such as DSL Rings (here and here), which could both help to extend the coverage of FTTC and boost its maximum speeds. At the same time the default VDSL2 specification, which FTTC currently uses, can already achieve 100Mbps but only over very short telephone lines. It's unclear how BT intends to reach the new speeds and whether or not it will only be available on the shortest of lines from your local street cabinet.

UPDATE 8:18am

BT has told us that their FTTC upload speeds will also be improved, although it doesn't say by how much. We know that FTTC upload speeds were already due to jump from a maximum of 10Mbps and up to 15Mbps, but otherwise it's unclear how high they will go when the download speeds jump to 80Mbps in 2012.

UPDATE 10:55am

BT informs us that the new FTTC speeds will be achieved by increasing the spectrum allocation within the Access Network Frequency Plan (ANFP) from 7MHz to 17MHz. This does not require new hardware (extra cost) and is not dependent on ‘vectoring’, which some of the newer DSL technologies are.

We've also been told that FTTC upload speeds could be boosted up to 20Mbps, although an official figure has yet to be decided. Furthermore BT claims that most customers within FTTC's existing footprint "will get a higher speed".

However, the small number of FTTC customers on "very long lines" will not benefit as the higher frequencies do not work well in such situations. In other words BT is effectively playing within the existing technology specification and simply pushing it to the top before trying anything new that might potentially incur an additional cost.

This is not unlike the shift from 2Mbps ADSL to 8Mbps ADSLMAX. Most people will benefit but distance from your local street cabinet is likely to become more of an issue as the top speeds are pushed ever higher.

UPDATE 3:01pm

More details from BT. Work on the new FTTC speed upgrades is expected to get underway by the end of this year (Q4-2011) and carry on throughout 2012.

BT also admittedly that future FTTC enhancements could indeed include the previously mentioned vectoring and bonding solutions. However, once again, this will play no part in the forthcoming 80Mbps upgrade.