Oftel has released its latest broadband ADSL fact sheet. It finds that, at the end of September, BT had enabled 1,708 local exchanges with ADSL and thus covered over 80% of UK households (population wise).

Typically the actual figure is closer to 78% because 3% of people in each area are out of range. 1,370,000 BT lines (end users) have now had broadband ADSL installed, with the usual 10,000 from Kingston.

Local loop unbundling (LLU) based exchanges have expanded to include an additional three. At the end of last month a total of 178 physical and 50 distant location facilities had been completed. Over 7800 loops have been connected with 41 new sites requesting builds.

Most of the developments have already been shown in our news, although this one is relevant for today:

Launch of BT Central 622Mbit/s: On the 28th October BT will launch the BT Central 622Mbit/s. This will allow Service Providers to purchase greater bandwidth, at present the highest BT Central Pipe offered by BT is 155Mbit/s.