The Managing Director of business ISP Fluidata, Piers Daniell, has criticised this week's launch of Annex M ADSL2+ technology by BT (Annex M offers faster broadband upload speeds by trading off some downstream performance) for being both late and delivering a service that fails to work properly with Cisco hardware.

Just to re-cap. A growing number of copper line / BT based UK ISPs currently offer ADSL2+ based broadband services, which provides download speeds of up to 24Mbps and uploads of up to 1.4Mbps. However Annex M is able to increase upload speeds to around 2.5Mbps, albeit only on good quality lines with an attenuation of less than 45db.

Annex M isn't new and some unbundled ( LLU ) ISPs, such as Be Broadband ( O2 ), have been offering it for years. Crucially you can already get it at a consumer pricing level from BE at just £21.97 per month alongside their most flexible BE PRO package. By comparison BT based ISPs will be more expensive.


However Daniell's main gripe is not with how late BT are to the party but the fact that "most businesses" could have difficulty adapting to BT's implementation of Annex M because it doesn't work well with Cisco technology.


It's difficult to determine whether this is a truly widespread problem, although Daniell appears adamant that "most businesses [do] like to buy [Cisco]". Unfortunately there are no clear figures for accurately assessing Cisco's share of the UK network/internet devices market. It would be interesting to know whether other providers have experienced similar gripes with BT's Annex M.