AAISP Reveals First Real World 330Mbps UK FTTP Broadband Trial Speeds

Business focused ISP Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) has today provided some of the first real customer feedback from its closed technical trial of BT’s latest ‘up to’ 330Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband technology, which saw one user receive actual internet download speeds of 192.39Mbps (Megabits per second) with 28.53Mbps upload and just 6ms latency.

Unlike BT’s slower FTTC service, which is constrained by a “last mile” run of older copper cable, FTTP takes that fibre optic cable directly to your home. This cuts out the interference and instability of using existing copper cable and can therefore deliver significantly faster speeds.

According to AAISP, the service itself was installed the day after it was ordered (well, it is a trial). But it’s worth pointing out that the customers line was actually syncing at 328Mbps, which is well above the 192Mbps delivered. Not that anybody with 192Mbps would complain (hardly any online services can make use of it anyway) but it does highlight a well known problem with attempting to deliver ultrafast speeds.

Adrian Kennard, Director of AAISP, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“We are getting the [end-user] to try different speed tests as well – obviously when you are dealing with lines like this the latency and TCP window size can have a huge impact on speed tests, so we are not too surprised by the result.

The other issue, of course, is that for us to have 330Mb/s of spare headroom on our BT link would cost around £16,000 a month to BT alone, so there will be times when there is not a full 330Mb/s available for this trial customer. Hopefully BT can look at some reductions in bandwidth costs with the launch of such services.”

Kennard makes an extremely important point and one that, in the race to roll-out superfast fibre optic broadband services, is often overlooked. Capacity could soon become a bigger obstacle than physical infrastructure (having an effectively 1Gbps capable infrastructure and delivering that are two very different things).

A quick look at South Korea, which has a national fibre (FTTH) infrastructure, might help to explain. The country’s average speeds still hover around 20Mbps because it would not be economically feasible to deliver 100Mbps+ to every home. Home broadband is still a shared “Best Efforts” service and fibre won’t change that.

Over the next few years bandwidth charges should, we hope, continue to fall but ISPs that launch fibre services will still need to be extremely careful about what they promote to customers.