NTL's latest results have highlighted a 40% growth in broadband subscriptions last year to 1.33m, which is expected to continue at between 20 to 25% this year. More interesting is the operators ADSL2+ trial.

The news that NTL had its eye on ADSL2+ technology is nothing new and was first hinted at in its own 21st Century Plan during November 2004. However, most were not aware that a trial had actually started.

The trial itself began during February last month and has already proven the technologies capability to deliver broadband connections with downstream line rates in excess of 18Mbps, without any modification to their copper infrastructure.

During this month NTL will extend the ADSL2+ trial to deliver on-demand streaming of HDTV channels over an IP Broadband infrastructure:

Our competitive advantage is largely due to the short distance of our copper loops to the home - 95% of ntl network is within 1000 meters to the home; 90% of BT's network is within 5,000 meters but only 5% is within 1,000 meters*

* Source: BT at Evolving Access Networks Conference Feb 2005.

This short distance allows us to deliver very high speed bandwidth to the home using next generation DSL technologies (ADSL2+ initially, followed later by VDSL2), without costly "fibre to the home" network investment.

Once again the stakes in the UK's broadband market have just been significantly increased. This is good news for consumers as operators will now be locked into a battle aimed at delivering super-speed broadband services.