Openreach Publish UK Pilot Pricing for FTTP Broadband Speeds to 8500Mbps UPDATE
National network operator Openreach (BT) has this afternoon published pricing details for their forthcoming pilot of XGS-PON based Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) home broadband ISP lines, which now includes the 5.5Gbps (550Mbps upload) and 8.5Gbps (850Mbps upload) tiers. The launch date for the pilot has also been put back slightly from 1st to 23rd March 2026.
As previously reported (here, here, here, here and here), Openreach are currently in the final stages of preparing to launch their first customer pilot of faster 10Gbps capable XGS-PON based full fibre technology with UK broadband ISPs (Passive Optical Network – the ‘X’ stands for 10, the ‘G’ for Gigabits’ and the ‘S’ for Symmetric speed). EE (BT) are currently the only retail ISP to have confirmed their involvement.
The new technology, which many of Openreach’s rivals are already using, will go beyond today’s top download speeds of 1.8Gbps on their GPON full fibre network and push up to 8.5Gbps. But until today the initial pilot announcement had so far only provided pricing details for symmetric speeds of up to 3.3Gbps.
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The latest briefing adds pricing details for their two fastest consumer focused download tiers – 5.5Gbps (550Mbps upload) and 8.5Gbps (850Mbps upload). Take note that they will also offer a symmetric speed variety of these tiers, although that’s likely to cost extra and be targeted at premium (business) connections. The briefing also confirms changes to pilot connection charges applicable from 1st April 2026.
Openreach XGS-PON Pilot Pricing
| Connection charges, excl. VAT (All bandwidths) | Pilot Charge Operative: 23/03/2026 – 31/03/2026 |
Pilot Charge Operative: 01/04/2026 |
| Standard Connection | £122.84 | £127.26 |
| Premium Connection | £152.84 | £158.34 |
| Advanced Connection | £297.84 | £308.56 |
| Standard Connection – XGS Box Swap | £0.00 | £0.00 |
| Proactive FTTP Upgrades – Standard Connection | £0.00 | £0.00 |
| Proactive FTTP Upgrades – Premium Connection | £30.00 | £31.08 |
| Proactive FTTP Upgrades – Advanced Connection | £175.00 | £181.30 |
Rental Charges
| XGS-PON Pilot (annual rental) | Pilot Charge Operative: 23/03/2026 – 31/03/2026 |
Pilot Charge Operative: 01/04/2026 |
| Up to 3300/330 Mbit/s | £324.00 | £324.00 |
| Up to 3300/3300 Mbit/s | £360.00 | £360.00 |
| Up to 5500/550 Mbit/s | £420.00 | £420.00 |
| Up to 8500/850 Mbit/s | £480.00 | £480.00 |
Readers should remember that Openreach’s pricing only reflects the wholesale cost of the line, while retail ISPs still have to add all sorts of extra costs on top before getting to the price you pay (e.g. 20% VAT, network/service features, general costs/support, profit margin etc.). Existing FTTP customers taking one of these new tiers will also require another engineer visit to install a 10Gbps capable Optical Network Terminal (ONT).
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Openreach has previously informed ISPreview that their pilot would initially begin across an area of 40,000 premises in Guildford, although this could still be expanded. The classic catch with packages this fast is that most consumers would struggle to fully harness those top speeds, usually due to various Wi-Fi/device limits and any limitations of the online servers you’re connecting to (Why Buying Gigabit Broadband Doesn’t Always Deliver).
One other issue to consider is that it often takes time for retail broadband providers and their suppliers to upgrade their network capacity in order to support such tiers, so even once launched (commercially) it may be a while before adoption improves. Finally, pilot pricing and product details should always be considered tentative (subject to change).
UPDATE 29th Jan 2026
Just to add, but we now understand that the pilot will also include neighbouring Woking.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Still up to their old tricks of cake slicing tiers, making upload speeds expensive. The sweet smelling FTTP ALTNETS however, are mostly symmetric by default and considerably cheaper. I mean 5.5gbps with 500mbps upload is laughable.
Hoping for ALTNET consolidation into one or two ALTNETS, that BT and Vermin Media don’t get their hands on, as these other milking machines need customer loss once their new roll-out come to a natural end and then stops hiding churn.
Yeah but how many of these fabled AltNets will be around in a couple of years time??
Could ask the same for BT and Vermin. BT pensions and debt mean they have had to dump/sell other parts of the business, and predatory investors have circled before, then Vermin has a huge debt pile, which, as reported on here caused a strategic rethink of Nexfibre deliverables, along with outsourcing of their staff.
The two well established telecoms are not immune as they still have their own issues. Once there is a big national ALTNET, with good footprint and likes of Sky taking up their network, as well as word of mouth that speeds are faster and cheaper, often with no in-contract price increases, then things may start to look very different.
One of the reasons i’d avoid a smaller Altnet is after storm damage it can take weeks to get reconnected, whereas Openreach are far bigger and can recover quickly. During the storms last year some Fibrus customers were still not reconnected for several weeks as they didnt have the staff. My fibre cables were dug up accidentally during roadworks, so BT sent me a 4g backup solution and had Openreach to replace the cables within a couple of days (and it was over the weekend when it happened). So Altnets are not for me.
Symmetrical 3300 is £360 annual divide that into 12 months £30 add £10 or £20
There’s the real price in pilot pricing not bad if the real prices are this way
One difference with Altnets is they only serve a handful of people. So they’re utterly irrelevant.
@fanny adams
one national altnet is not the way to go. you need balance.
you don’t want it swamped with altnets like you have now, nor saturated to just 1 network.
if you had just one network, innovation would stifle, and prices would be high.
@Benjamin, we had one national network for far too many years, well, most of us anyway, there were those who had Virgin.
I am glad we have more choice, but I agree, I would not want one national altnet6, unless it was a non-profit-making company.
@Notomania The altnets collectively cover quite a lot of the country now. And let’s be honest there is no way whatsoever Openreach would be bringing in packages like this if not for the altnet competition. I get the view most people are not interested in these multi-gig symmetrical packages but there is a decent minority that are. Even if it were only 5%-10% that’s still hundreds of millions if not billions in revenue up for grabs. So altnets are not irrelevant, even if they’re not in your area, because they are forcing Openreach to keep moving instead of collecting monopoly profits.
“Yeah but how many of these fabled AltNets will be around in a couple of years time??”
Yawn. People have been saying much the same for years. CityFibre still going strong, as are ISPs such as Cuckoo, Zen, A&A
John – the altnets love to overlap each other, so any coverage figures don’t show the full picture. Two altnets in my area, both will claim me as part of their premises passed stats, and I’m a customer of neither as I wouldn’t dream of moving away from OR. Why would I downgrade?
FANNY_VERIFY: Ivor, you are a BT shareholder and naturally you need to nurture your investment.
How is an ALTNET downgrade? You didn’t say which metric was used to classify the downgrade?
Symmetric speeds, cheaper pricing, no in-contract price rises, IPV6 support, often a btter router if you need an ISP router that is – how is that a downgrade?
The only downgrade is that BT have a superior response in terms of sheer engineer numbers for fault resolution than the ALTNETS, but bigger ALTNETS have realised that now. Over time, I’d expect BT to cut numbers to save money as PSTN/Copper was more unreliable than fibre anyway.
Openreach’s network resiliency is unmatched. As this website has shown, some altnets have collapsed in the aftermath of major weather events due to their preference of using powered street equipment instead of housing it all in a sturdy building. You’ve jogged my brain and reminded me that some altnets love to contract out and outsource maintenance (leading to shambles like having to bring someone over from the other side of the country) while the BT Group has their own people in the right places.
I am happy with my ISP and I am happy with my Openreach service. Flawless performance and fully functional IPv6 are in the mix (unlike a certain altnet, often praised on here, who seems to crop up time and time again).
Living in a little village just outside sedgefield, we don’t have fibre as its not feasible and financially viable, therefore have to stick to copper cables and 2.5 speed wifi. So think yourselves lucky whatever you currently have.
Hope this comment downloads in full
Ivor, BT isn’t “flawless” though. Not all Openreach providers have IPv6 enabled, even their own ISP, Plusnet doesn’t.
Also BT Openreach on GPON isn’t flawless. My mother has had FTTP since day one some years ago with BT then EE then Plusnet. In every case, the speed is not what is advertised. For example upload, was 75mbps but was always 68mbps. She has gigabit now (because of price offer being like £2 more than slowest speed) and it says 120mbps – she gets 103mbps on upload (wired or wireless). Other ISP’s like ALTNETS or even Virgin Media OVER PROVISION to try and ensure you get the speed. It’s a modern 2.5gbps router with CAT8 cable to ONT, with no WIFI issues and WIFI6 capability. The same router with virtually the same configuration for WIFI, just the WAN bit different (PPoE on BT vs DHCP for other ISPs) gives over the speed when the network ISN’T Openreach based.
At those prices and shocking upload speeds, how do they expect to be able to compete with competitors.
Openreach are making the same mistakes that got them is a huge mess to begin with, trying to please shareholders in this way damages the business.
What mess is that?
To be fair not everyone is a torrent user, or trying to convert their home into a datacentre.
From what I can see of those prices, there is a very small premium for symmetrical, which I think is sensible, as most customers who are price sensitive will get the 10:1 ratio packages, and if they children trying to abuse torrents, then the effect on the shared PON will be heavily mitigated.
Whilst those who want to run a datacentre from their home, or be a torrent seeder, there will be packages for them.
We have to remember altnet prices are because they have a weak brand need to grab market share, can see with the financial challenges they having, that these prices are probably not viable long term. Openreach dont have that problem, so there can be more sensible from the off.
Consumers do kind of need education that if you want a cutting edge internet connection, then its worth more than 50 quid a month, now days is everyone expecting the world for not more than a tenner.
Despite all the Ofcom imposed shackles to try to create the mirage of a healthy competitive market, Openreach lead in every statistic that matters. BT Group shareholders don’t have much to complain about.
I’m sure Selley and Kirkby are having crisis meetings now that you’ve declared it a “mess”…
I assume you’re referring to the historical decision to pursue FTTC. This is not comparable. Openreach can (and very likely are able to) quickly rollout XGS and any speed that their customers – the ISPs – demand.
Simon, maybe look at the respective profitability, market share, FTTP rollout and take up of Openreach and the altnets and reconsider your comments.
How do they expect to compete? They won’t. They will keep getting by because the Altnets, although expanding their coverage, still don’t have anywhere near the coverage of BT/Openreach. Openreach were the first to bring fibre to my area and as a result I signed up to them from day one. I expect this is a story that rings true for many people.
Now, I get 2 gigabit symmetrical from YouFibre because competition has arrived and it’s cheaper. I’d honestly be happy with 1 gig / 1 gig but can’t complain.
Just want to point out that nobody on a domestic package needs those speeds to be symmetrical. Nobody.
Respectfully [shhhh] about what people need and don’t need
It comes back to the ignorance that because you don’t need it, then no one else needs it. You need to understand that people are free to spend their money how they like, and ultimately, some people have large family households with heavy users, not just for 1 person to a single device
I doubt they are for domestic use, but no doubt there will be some people who have more money than sense and will get it just because they can. Like people going to 1Gb/s and more and never make full use of it. I saved my brother money by getting him to lower the speed he was on, because it was a waste of money paying for 500Mb/s when he was not using anywhere near it
Up to people at the end of the day, but I do know of some people who gets fast speeds just to say they have it, like someone I knew who used to buy expensive phones, just to show off really.
Point is dear Ed, that just because YOU do not have a requirement does not mean others don’t.
For example, syncing your media and photos to the cloud or your own off site server, maybe people work in media and need to upload and download media projects (they can be big, as not compressed). Many other uses too, like multiple people doing stuff at same time (4K streaming, uploading etc).
And lastly Ed, for those that can, why pick an inferior service that is asymmteric at a more expensive price, than a faster speed with an ALTNET at a cheaper price that is symmetric.
Trot along….
Well, lets for a min forget about people actually “needing” such speed (people wishing to “home game” for example) you seem to be forgetting the other side of the coin, Want! IMO No one “needs” a Ferrari or even a VM Golf GTI, but plently enough people WANT them. Sure (at least for the moment) these are niche speeds but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a market for such packages avalable to the public.
I remember when people used to say “no one needs 512k broadband”, and at the time it wasn’t a “need” but you could be dam sure such connections were coveted by us broke college kids still stuck on dial up.
People don’t need to own Ferraris or Bugattis either but they are available for those who want them.
There’s always one 640K’er.
Like no-one “needed” 14.4K back in the day. And if you had a 14.4K modem, you were “obviously” downloading warez.
Some things never change; “I don’t need it, therefore no one else needs it”.
I don’t *need* 2.5Gb. But it makes downloading anything much quicker, with bandwidth to spare for browsing and streaming.
Bring on 10GB. I dont need it, but I can use it.
Ed, many may not but the legacy networks only had so much bandwidth so the prioritised downstream at the expence of upstream, the fibre networks are using XGS-PON which is 10Git Up and Down, there is absolutely no technical reason to cap upload speed.
Yes, and Ferraris cost a lot more than mass market cars.
If people want these speeds they are available today. It’s called an ethernet connection.
No Alex, we do not need BT’s expensive leased lines – we already have an alternative in most areas (thankfully), its called ALTNETS, and most offer symmetric better technology than what BT does.
We no longer hamstrung by BT choosing out of date technologies like GPON that they still deploy as their default offering, and for those lucky areas, customers do not have to put up with knee capped technologies from BT either or their ludicrous pricing strategies to try and make people take the lowest tiers so they don’t have to scale better tech/infrastructure (like staying on GPON all this time when nearly everyone else was at least XGS-PON or is now).
I certainly cannot think of a use case for domestic multi-gig /upload/ speeds. If you’re really syncing that much data up the cloud, perhaps you should persuade AWS to build a local zone in your shed! And let’s be honest, only 0.1% of people have home networks good enough to even use >1Gbps in either direction, since even now 2.5GbE routers/switches are premium and not the norm, and 10GbE kit is still very pricey.
So, the UK only deploys the lowest capable just because YOU can’t think of a need LOL
You know AI will be getting bigger and bigger as well from now over the next few years too? Whilst the data and apps are not fully known right now, and given it takes BT 10 years+ to deploy anything at scale that isn’t trial, you’d rather be reactive later and when it’s too late; possibly requiring tax payer funded handouts? I mean BT just started coughing up about XGS-PON when ALTNETS started it several years ago and BT only looking to do trials from April 2026. Probably another 5 years+ before they make available for everyone on GPON. Meanwhile the ALTNETS probably gone to 50PON or 100PON by then.
If BT wasn’t the original monopoly established over decades, and was a fresh starter like the ALTNETS, they’d simply have been wiped out by now and irrelevant due to inferior product.
@A Stevens, it’s not about the overall quantity of data. My upload usage is _way_ less than download like everybody else. But when I upload files I want them done in seconds not minutes. It’s about burst. That’s why I have 2.3/2.3 package at home. It makes a big difference when you are waiting for uploads to complete especially working from home. That’s all there is to it really. Nothing special or rare. Not sure why people get so anti it. Maybe they like waiting.
Disagree – With cloud storage becoming the norm for home users nowadays upload speed is important.
Also with cameras becoming 4k on phones and laptops video streaming with multiple home workers hogs the upload.
Every IOT device wants precision time sync and log syncs.
Laughs in youfibre.
Yup – £99 all in.
The pilot pricing is to try to get some ISPs to take part – otherwise, for a tiny footprint in Guildford, it’s not worth their while.
1G/1G is available in some BDUK type C areas already, but as it’s priced at £1,243.20 + VAT per year (from 1st April) I don’t see ISPs beating down the doors to offer it. Similarly for 1G/220M at £932.40 + VAT, which is available across the whole FTTP footprint.
Cerberus FTTP Ultra selling it 900/220 at £212.16 monthly fee with activation fee £594.
Way too expensive just for extra 105Mbps upload are so ridiculous!
I am on Full Fibre 900/115 with Aquiss ISP. Don’t need extra speed. 🙂
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/1768318988214239755
You used to say you didn’t need extra speed when you were on 330/50 – so clearly you did once and probably will again!
Bring it on, let’s get the connections to people and maybe invent a service by accident that can make full use of it.
On XG_S_-PON, why aren’t the speeds symmetrical? There is no longer a technical reason for this.
Of course there is, at gigabit plus speeds, most downloads will be short and bursty, so contention risks are low.
However if you are hosting content, it is effectively limitless on how much it is utilised. On XGS services, the risks of upstream congestion is higher than downstream congestion, obviously even more so on GPON.
Many consumer targeted services cannot even saturate a gigabit upload. Such as youtube, streamify, google drive, one drive. The way this upload is actually needed aside from ego, is if you running non standard such as business type usage, hosting from home, and of course torrenting.
whilst you are not wrong greggles, i do find this kind of dinosaur mindset to be outdated. there is nothing odd or non-standard in this day and age of cord cutters and overlay networks – of having friends and family sharing access to your internal files.
i personally have migrated a lot of the family off of those services you mention, instead selfhosting it and showing how to automate backups to the nas which ultimately backup offsite too.
none of this should be treated as strange or non-standard. its the kind of thing a lot of residential users should be doing as a matter of general best practice.
i also share access to my own internal network to some family over the internet through a wireguard tunnel. none of this should ever be viewed as outside the scope of general genuine residential utilisation.
i sometimes see some people who want to narrow the scope of what in their minds should be allowed on a residential line and i genuinely wonder why they hold those views. how far does it go? only allowed to check email between the hours of 9am to 5pm? i jest but as a general principle, widespread utilisation like backups is standard
But when I can order it. Road is enabled
Pointless speeds , if ur using speeds like that for personal use then you have a serious social problem
Are you okay?
Trials, that old chestnut. BT trials are pointless information to the public. Take FTTP for example, They trialed 1Gbps FTTP in 2011, 15 years ago! it took place in Kesgrave, Suffolk, yet still today so many still can’t get FTTH/FTTP. They wasted years on G.fast trials. I swear this company is run by dinosaurs with no ambition to rank with the best Internet Speeds in the world. Also, why trial 8.5 Gbit, they should be trialing 10 Gbit, which is 9.4 Gbit with overhead. They are stupid AF.
Kesgrave has been on Openreach’s copper stop sell list for a while (ie, coverage exceeds 75%). Given the high concentration of BT employees and the fact that it is the local exchange to BT’s R&D HQ, I would doubt that they’d be without FTTP for too long. CityFibre and Trooli are also available.
“I swear this company is run by dinosaurs with no ambition to rank with the best Internet Speeds in the world. ”
I think BT Group’s shareholders would point out that Openreach are the largest and most successful FTTP operator in the UK by every metric that matters, and their stats now rival or exceed that of many of our peer countries. Openreach certainly did make a mistake with their previous copper obsession, but they’ve more than made up for it now.
“Also, why trial 8.5 Gbit, they should be trialing 10 Gbit, which is 9.4 Gbit with overhead. They are stupid AF.”
Perhaps they’re not interested in allowing one user to individually exhaust PON capacity at will? Why does YouFibre “only” offer 8Gbps? Are they dinosaurs too?
Their ambition is to cover as much of the country as possible, not to break speed records. Why is that so hard to get your head around? If their ambition was to rank with the best internet speeds in the world then they would do that, but then they’d also reach only a tiny proportion of homes. They’re the mass market provider. It’s really not that complicated or them being dinosaurs. It’s a successful business model.
8.5 is XGSPON with overheads.
You’d need 25PON to allow a 10Gbps symmetric product.
I should know, I was involved in the first deployment of 25PON in the UK.
Hello Ivor!
Was wondering when BT’s shareholder would turn up.
Now on your quote:
“I think BT Group’s shareholders would point out that Openreach are the largest and most successful FTTP operator in the UK by every metric that matters, and their stats now rival or exceed that of many of our peer countries. Openreach certainly did make a mistake with their previous copper obsession, but they’ve more than made up for it now.”
Let’s see how the customer churn goes when BT complete roll out and no longer have new areas and new customers to mask current customer churn i.e. those that leave for ALTNETS. Totally agree, on paper, they look OK right now.
Secondly, about the copper thing – Yes BT held the country back flogging a dead horse that was FTTC and all the issues with ECI cabinets that went on with it. Hell, they couldn’t even do vectoring which would have made the experience so much better to reduce cross talk. Only when ALTNETS came along and showed BT how you put fibre to the customer, were they forced to relent but still persist with bad choice of GPON (maybe not in beginning but continuing to roll out to this day en masse when everyone else used XGS-PON) and hamstrung products with limited upload like 550mbps for 5.5gbps tier.
They even went to FTTC deployment late because they thought ADSL Max was good enough and FTCC was extra cost for cabinets/battery backup and fibre to the cabinets.
The original FTTC deployment was fine. It achieved the government’s goals of superfast (30Mbps+) and Openreach could deploy it rapidly. The wheels fell off when they tried to push cabinet based G.fast as a competitive response to Virgin (*not* the altnets) instead of going to FTTP at that point.
Openreach was the largest FTTP network operator even in those pro copper days, before any altnet came onto the scene – they certainly didn’t need to be “shown” how to deploy fibre.
GPON is fine too. Sky didn’t choose to use CityFibre because they have more XGSPON in their network, they chose it because they’re cheaper. Openreach have their hands tied there, unfortunately, though the case for deregulation and a truly free market becomes clearer every day.
The FTTC rollout was driven by two primary things;
The need to improve broadband speeds rapidly to as many people as possible
The Ofcom strategic review having an uncertain outcome and causing investors to sit on their hands.
It’s a weird rewriting of history to argue that it would have been better for UK PLC for some broadband users to have got very much better speeds while everyone else stayed on 8mbps, versus almost everyone getting access to 24-40mbps in a pretty short timeframe.
If it was such an obvious no-brainer there was nothing to stop another operator getting funding to roll out a national FTTP network off their own bat. I don’t remember anyone doing that.
The TSR paused investment at a critical time. No rational operator will borrow billions to begin building a national network without knowing if they would be allowed to keep the network they built and what they might be able to charge people to use it. Who would lend money in that scenario? ‘Build it and we might be allowed to keep it, might not. Who knows?’
To correct Ivor, Sky made a XGSPON rollout part of their agreement with CityFibre, the rollout got announced in the same press release as Sky, and was confirmed at a later date as well. Sky CityFibre service went up on their website when CityFibre were almost finished rolling out XGS.
My point still stands. If I were a major ISP who had enormous bargaining power over a financially desperate altnet, I’d probably chuck it in as a throwaway clause too. I suspect the number of Sky customers who actually have a multi gig service that requires XGS is relatively small.
It’s pricing. Nothing else.
No one has the hardware or storage to make use of those speeds.
It’s the ultimate cyber willy waving.
Another misinformed person sprinkling their misinformation magic powder.
10gbps in my house. If BT supported higher than 1.6gbps and more importantly more than 105mbps upload (that’s the average for so called 115/120 as BT always under the speed, whereas others over provision), then an off-site server for backups could easily then handle the speeds.
Your scenario does not fit, and other people, but that does not mean all do not fit.
That’s not a realistic scenario, is it?
What residential user has a need to perform a regular, full backup offsite? An initial backup might take some time but all subsequent ones would be incremental.
A 100mbps upload rate is 45 Gigabytes per hour. A typical PC hard drive, even if completely full, could be backed up in its entirety in 6 hours. Daily incremental uploads would take seconds or minutes.
It’s a surreal argument. Invent a nonsense use case and then rubbish products even though they meet the needs of that case perfectly well.
Funny you say that.
I have a 10gbps backbone here at home and most my devices have 2.5gbe and Wi-Fi 7.
So talk for yourself.
As for my business, 100gbps server links, 10gbps site backbone, 2.5gbe through to users and AP’s.
In agreement with 125us.
I have a 1000/1000 connection, the mainstream providers line one drive, google drive etc. do struggle to saturate gigabit upload, there seems to be an assumption from those stuck on Openreach that if Openreach opened the flood gates that these consumer cloud backup services would be multi gig uploads. They might be if from multiple devices at the same time, but not from a single end point PC/Laptop.
Also the incremental point is valid, like most sensible people my backups to the cloud are only changed/new files, I dont do a complete fresh backup every time as that is complete lunacy.
I earlier this evening copied about 30 gig of data to a location which is sync’d to one drive, and it was done in under an hour, the first time that amount of data has been done in about a year or so. Usually its just the odd photo or document.
I can certainly think of use cases, where upload is kept much more busy for sustained periods, but I dont consider these to fall within the realm of normal ‘legal’ consumer use. It doesnt mean I dont think it should be available, having new tech is great, and I think the 160mbps upload on the current packages is too extreme, but I can understand the basic standard package on the XGS packages being restricted.
The software isn’t really there for symmetric multi-gig products besides some home server applications, piracy, etc. I know of one person who uses a ton of bandwidth not for piracy but a really bad workflow.
If people buying these products used hundreds of Mbits a second all the time networks would fold. Prices rely on people not using 100% anywhere near all the time.
They’re great to get the same things done faster. They’re great to increase productivity for some things. For most people the case for having them is dubious but them being available is great.
The more choice the better. Now for the symmetric multi-gig above 3.3. They said it was coming and no reason to not believe them. If it’s too expensive for residential that’s life. The only similar products even from the usual suspect’s beloved altnets are expensive enough that not many people will buy them.
Not sure why anyone’s complaining to be honest. Don’t have to buy it if you don’t want to. They don’t have to sell it if they don’t want to and leaves space in the market for others to fill if they don’t.
How nice for the people of Guildford. Im still in the Bronze age with my FTC connection. How about rolling out FTP for everyone else first? The UK is behind some 3rd world countries as far as full fibre broadband is concerned.
Which “third world” country has higher than 82% FTTP coverage?
Care to name those countries?
@SJ – lots of other companies who could give you FTTP.
3.3Gbps symmetric would do me nicely…
It wont be 5 years before this is available, probably around 6 months or so after the trial starts (going by EE’s record on 1.6gbit). As for not needing this speed? When i first ordered FTTP an Openreach engineer asked me what i wanted it for as i was getting 30/4 on FTTC and that was surely fast enough. Now with FTTP i have 900/110 and run a NAS with my own VPN which I couldnt reliably do before. I set up a VPN partly because I wanted to access my movie collection remotely (usually on a 5g android tablet). For instance, yesterday i was watching Top Gun in my car while i was waiting on the wee one getting out of school. Now looking back people on this forum are making the same mistake by saying what is the use of these speeds? Technology will evolve and a use for these speeds will come out in time. Its just a matter of time.
+1
I can’t agree more! People need to possess technology before they can innovate and create new things. Before we had 5G, how many people imagined we could livestream while walking down the street? (We’re not discussing the pros and cons of livestreaming here anyway.
Unsure that “it makes streaming of my Completely Legally Obtained content easier” is a winning use case tbh.
Anyway, as for the other point – jumps in CPU capability and (what used to be) cheap RAM have not necessarily led to better software, just less efficient software, particularly the scourage of Electron apps that are effectively just websites and run very slowly even on modern hardware.
My webpages don’t load any faster than they did when I was on 2Mbps ADSL, because websites have just become more bloated.
TV and radio news were “livestreaming” on 4G. That actually is a genuinely good use case as it has replaced expensive, complicated satellite links in a lot of cases and has allowed live reporting for stories that previously would not have justified it.
@Ivor, implement QoS on your router and cap your connection speed to 2mbps and let us know whether you truly experience no difference with a faster connection:)
Meanwhile places like South Korea, Japan and China have had 10Gbps for nearly 10 years now.
Last time I checked, works out to about £40pm for 10G in Japan.
BT still clinging on to slow upgrade path, over charging customers and purposefully restricting services to protect their cash cow of businesses overpaying for service. Only £3-5k per month for a 10G port…
This is why the west has fallen behind so much in the last 30 years.
The Japanese economy has been stagnant for over 30 years. It’s only just started to show signs of growth.
Currently on 1.8 Gbps. I don’t really need faster than that, and I doubt most home users do. But the asymmetrical speeds are an issue. Openreach would be better to focus on making existing speed options symmetrical before adding more download speeds. 1.8 Gbps up and down would be brilliant!
Love how no one ever takes offense on the upload speeds – pathetic – spent billionms but cant give symetric speeds – in other countries fiber has mostly meant upload = download – but no not in blighty we get screwed over as usual. Shame next/city fiber wasnt around when BT dug up the whole of the uk to add FTTP as it would have been good/better competition now.
From the article:
‘Take note that they will also offer a symmetric speed variety of these tiers, although that’s likely to cost extra and be targeted at premium (business) connections.’
Many people not taking offence is why they can do it.
Will Openreach be launching symmetrical speeds at affordable price at any point on a consumer connection?
Stil paying £104 pcm for 8gb/8gb with a fixed ip address with you fibre… openreach/bt etc etc will never compete with this.