UPDATE BT has withdrawn its announcement, see bottom. BTOpenreach, which is responsible for managing access to BT's local UK telephone and broadband ISP network, has today announced that four rural telephone exchanges have been shortlisted to take part in a unique Fibre Only Exchange (FOX) trial.

Under the plan, which was first hinted at last month, BT would aim to replace the chosen exchange's "copper-based products" with services based off their latest ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premises ( FTTP ) and "Ethernet fibre network" technologies. Both types of network will be built and operated within Trial phases.

The candidate locations are:
•Orsett, Essex
•Roydon, Essex
•Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire
•Sutton, Cheshire

BT's FTTP technology is designed to take a fibre optic cable directly to your home or business, which allows it to achieve significantly faster speeds of up to 110Mbps (future performance could rise to 1Gbps).

So far most of BT's planned and rather limited (2.5 Million premises) FTTP rollout has focused upon urban locations and is intended to operate alongside existing copper based solutions, such as ADSL2+ (up to 24Mbps) and FTTC (up to 40Mbps). In the majority of cases FTTP services would only account for a small fraction of an exchanges total coverage.

Today's new trial intends to reverse that trend by examining what happens when a remote location is pushed onto the latest technology. BT will be keen to look not only at the costs but also the timescales and general practicalities involved.

Communication Providers (ISPs) have been given until 9th September 2011 to "indicate [their] preferred Exchange". Meanwhile questions remain over how BT will go about deploying the solution and how it will impact existing services. The commercial launch of FTTP itself has already faced a number of delays because of problems with the installation process (i.e. it takes too long), although BT is gearing up to introduce the service before the end of this year.

UPDATE 5th August 2011

BT claim that the source of the above news was a draft announcement that had been posted "due to an internal error" and as a result is now withdrawn. BT do intend to pursue the trial, albeit at some point "over the next three to four years" and potentially by selecting from a different shortlist of exchanges.


UPDATE 26th August 2011

The final/correct exchanges have now been revealed - HERE.