Glasgow will become one of the first cities in the UK to benefit from BT's next generation 'up to' 40Mbps fibre optic ( FTTC ) broadband service. The move is part of a new BT plan to accelerate rollout of the technology. More than 15,500 homes and businesses in the Hillington, Cardonald and Crookston areas of the city will benefit as BT ploughs extra resource into bringing forward the switch on date to the autumn – ahead of the original 2010 schedule.

To drive forward the timescale, BT is building 56 new street cabinets and installing around 30 miles of fibre optic line stretching from the exchange to the boxes carrying the sophisticated electronics (street cabinets - i.e. Fibre to the Cabinet / FTTC). The plan is part of BT's £1.5 billion investment in next-gen services, which aims to make faster broadband available to 40% of the UK (10 million homes) by 2012.


Work is already underway in Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart, Corstorphine, Stockbridge and New Town areas and in the west, Giffnock, Bridgeton, a key location in the Clyde Gateway Regeneration project and the 2014 Commonwealth Games, along with Kelvingrove, taking in Glasgow University, the hospitals and art gallery. Some 75,000 Edinburgh and Glasgow premises could benefit.

The FTTC service, which will connect with homes using existing "Last Mile" copper wire and VDSL2 technology, will support super-fast broadband speeds of up to 40Mbps, potentially rising to 60Mbps in the future. Initial upstream speeds of between 5 and 10Mbps, eventually rising to 15Mbps, will also be possible. The news follows a separate warning that slow and unreliable broadband in the Scottish Highlands is hampering business, one of many remote areas likely to feel left out by the new network:


Separately BT has confirmed earlier news (here) by boosting the speed of its existing ADSL based Total Broadband packages from 8Mbps to a theoretical maximum of up to 20Mbps ( ADSL2+ ). Upload performance has also risen from 448Kbps (0.45Mbps) to 1Mbps. BT Retail is offering the faster speeds at no extra cost. However many customers live in areas that have not yet been upgraded to support the new speeds.

UPDATE - 18th August @ 08:14am

A BT spokesperson has confirmed to ZDNet that the reason Glasgow has been pushed up the list so quickly is "as a result of some of the issues that we're experiencing in Muswell Hill". That is a clear reference to the recent local complaints that hampered its installation of new street side cabinets in the area because they were too ugly and causing an obstruction (here). Good going guys, now Glasgow has the rest of your broadband :glee: .