Many UK consumers may be unable to benefit from the new generation of "super-fast" broadband ISP services because of a bottleneck with old computer hardware and routers, with slow Wi-Fi (wireless) networks being a particular pain. Virgin Media raised this issue at its 50Mbps launch last year and yesterday saw BT talking about the same problem.

BT had organized a trip to Bradwell Abbey in Milton Keynes to showcase its current, and somewhat behind schedule, 110Mbps fibre optic ( FTTP ) based broadband trial. It was a chance to see firsthand what is involved in the physical deployment of fibre including the opportunity to talk to engineers, see equipment being installed and talk to some pre-selected triallists.

According to the PC Pro summary of events, BT engineers complained that some pilot customers ran into trouble with poor speeds and often mistakenly blamed the service. In reality the issue could usually be traced to computer hardware, such as slow wireless networks or ancient computers, which simply couldn't keep up with the speeds.


Likewise some consumers also expected that a 100Mbps connection would make everything on the internet run faster, when in fact most web services impose restrictions to prevent their servers getting overloaded with data requests. These limits are often significantly below a 100Mbps connection and remain quite normal.

Finally BT claimed that the reason it increased the maximum speed of its FTTP service from 100Mbps to 110Mbps last week is not due to competition from Virgin Media UK. Instead the operator wanted to give ISPs some headroom to allow for advertised speeds of 100Mbps to actually be possible. As if they wouldn't have done that anyway.

The fact is that most people don't need the top speed of 110Mbps, at least not yet and probably not for a few more years. However it is also a mistake to use this as any kind of argument against deploying fibre optic broadband networks. Demand will catch up but the real benefit is in the underlying infrastructure improvement.

It's not whether you can deliver 100Mbps but often whether you can deliver a stable 10Mbps, 20Mbps or greater to those who could previously only get less than a handful of Megabits per second (Mbps). That is what makes the real difference, the ability to gain a stable improvement in performance beyond today's often woeful copper based ADSL infrastructure.