The BBC's technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones (blog), has written about an interesting new housing development in Wembley (North London), which claims to include the promise of 'up to' 100Mbps broadband speeds using fibre optic infrastructure.

Cellan-Jones notes that residents have access to phone, broadband and IPTV (Internet TV) over the network, though nobody is actually being offered a specific 100Mbps subscription:


The blog reports that when the BOOST button is pressed a file was successfully downloaded at 78Mbps and as much as 50Mbps upstream. However not all services can cope, with Apple's iTunes prompting that a 1GB movie download would have taken 20mins (it should be a lot quicker with the speeds stated above).

It's certainly worth remembering that while a connection can be very fast, many other online services from websites to file transfer servers will often still be far slower. For example, many web servers limit the maximum speed at which you can download from any single connection, thus helping to balance network load.