BT Wholesale has confirmed 150 new telephone exchanges that will bring its 'up to' 24Mbps ( ADSL2+ ) supporting Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) service to more than 16.8 million UK homes and businesses by Spring 2011. This complements the last batch of 148 released during March, which covered the period to Winter 2010 (here).

Currently more than 1.1 million end-users are taking BT Wholesale’s WBC copper "next generation" broadband service, with more than 55 wholesale customers adding around 20-30,000 end users each week. This is usually offered by BT based ISPs such as BT Retail , IDNet , Zen Internet and many other providers. So far exchanges serving more than 55% of UK homes and businesses have been enabled.


Running over BT’s 21st Century Network ( 21CN ), WBC is not just about ADSL2+ broadband services and is also designed to support the operators latest 'up to' 40Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet ( FTTC ) next generation broadband technology. FTTC itself is aiming to reach at least 10 million (40%) UK homes and businesses by summer 2012. All WBC enabled exchanges are connected by Gbit Ethernet fibre links.

BT Wholesale has also confirmed it's introducing Service Level Agreement (SLA) targets for its enhanced WBC throughput levels.


BT hopes this will ensure homes and businesses on its new broadband platform increasingly experience, for the majority of the time, throughput levels approaching their line rate. Sadly BT did not include the list of new exchanges to be upgraded but we have put in a request (expect an update tomorrow).

UPDATE 21st April

Thinkbroadband have put the full list together over here, saving us some time :) .