BT Detail 11th June UK Launch and Prices for 330Mbps Fibre Optic Broadband

BTOpenreach, which manages access to BT’s national UK telecoms infrastructure, has confirmed its intention to begin offering the “fastest wholesale broadband speeds currently available” via a new “premium” 330Mbps (Megabits per second) capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) service from 11th June 2012. The first pricing and a new 220Mbps option have also been revealed.

BT’s current FTTP service offers a maximum internet download speed of 110Mbps (30Mbps uploads), although trials are already underway in Kesgrave (Suffolk) that could one day allow BT to push its service all the way to 1Gbps (Gigabits per second). In the meantime they’ve been busy conducting trials of the 330Mbps upgrade (likely to be advertised as “300Mbps“), which curiously retains the same maximum upload speed of 30Mbps as their existing 110Mbps product.

BT has also revealed a special offer price for the services launch, which will see the wholesale cost of their 330Mbps (20Mbps upload speed) product variant being reduced by over a third until 31st January 2013. Sadly the £80 +vat one-off connection will remain in place. Orders placed for the 330/20Mb product up to the end of the special offer period of 31st January 2013 will continue to have the special rental applied to these assets for the billing period up to and including 31st January 2014.

It should be pointed out that the “Transition product” is only available in conjunction with an existing Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) service from BTWholesale or a MPF phone line from an unbundled (LLU) service, which reflects customers who take both a bundled broadband and phone package. As usual the above prices are what ISPs have to pay BTOpenreach and do not include VAT (20%), the ISPs needed profit margin or other crucial costs. The final price for consumers will usually be a lot higher.

BT has also confirmed that it intends to launch a new FTTP 220Mbit/s product “in the new year” (i.e. 2013), although further details were not available. It should be fairly easy for BT to do this but they always conduct trials, even on slower services, before introducing a new product. No further details were available.

At present BT’s FTTP service coverage is tiny and thus only a smaller number of UK ISPs, such as BT Retail and Zen Internet, have launched packages for it. This could improve next Spring 2013 when BT introduces a new FTTP-on-Demand service that will effectively make the product available anywhere that their slower FTTC service can already go (66% of the UK by 2014, with some limitations). But this is not expected to be cheap and is aimed towards business customers.