BTOpenreach, which provides rival Internet Service Providers (ISP) with equal access to BT's local UK telecoms infrastructure, has revealed the timetable for its Fibre-to-the-Cabinet ( FTTC ) based superfast broadband speed trial and upgrade to 80Mbps (Megabits per second).

BT revealed earlier this year (here) that it planned to boost the maximum speed of FTTC up to 80Mbps (20Mbps uploads) by increasing its spectrum allocation within the Access Network Frequency Plan (ANFP) from 7MHz to 17MHz. This does not require new hardware and is not dependent upon vectoring (i.e. a cheap and fairly easy upgrade).

At present the maximum download speed of FTTC is 40Mbps (10-15Mbps uploads). FTTC itself ( aka - BT-Infinity ) delivers a fibre optic cable from the exchange to your local street cabinet (i.e. replacing the old copper line), while the remaining connection (between cabinets and homes) is done using VDSL2 via existing copper cable (similar to current ADSL broadband but faster over short distances).

The new timetable reveals that BT aims to complete the essential DSLAM profile and other changes for 80Mbps FTTC between late November 2011 and 28th January 2012. The first ISP trials will then take place between the end of January 2012 and March 2012. At present the official product launch hasn't been finalised and is merely listed as being "planned for later in 2012".

The 80Mbps product will initially follow the same fault threshold rate of 15Mbps (i.e. speeds below that are considered a fault) as their existing 40Mbps service. BT and some other ISPs also offer a threshold of 5Mbps for longer lines. A third fault threshold (TBA) will launch when the product itself goes live, although a new flexible fault threshold will be introduced from 19th March 2012, which will enable ISPs "to more flexibly provide bundled services to end users".

BT recently hinted at future plans that could push FTTC to 100Mbps and beyond by using some form of vectoring based solution. At present Alcatel-Lucent, which BT already works with, is the only firm with a commercial solution on the table (here). BT is also warning that some customers might not be able to handle the new speeds.


This is good advice because slower Wi-Fi networks often cause consumers to become confused about their ISPs actual performance, which is something that we in our 'First Year of Superfast fttc Broadband' article earlier this year.

BT is currently investing £2.5bn into its rollout of superfast broadband, which should reach 66% of UK homes by 2015 (40% in 2012) and could go significantly further once councils have decided how best to spend the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office's initial budget of £530m (could rise to £830m by 2017). So far BT has already managed to reach 5 Million homes and businesses with FTTC.