UK ISP BT Retail has today issued an update for its nationwide Race to Infinity survey, which seeks to gauge how much demand exists for its new "super-fast" ( FTTC / FTTH (FTTP)) broadband services (original news). The telephone exchange areas that receive the most responses (must be over 1000 votes) will benefit from a super-fast service upgrade by 2012.

Annoyingly BT has only allowed respondents until 31st December 2010 to get their votes in, which many have criticised for being far too short. However the operator has given its competition a lot of publicity, thus Caxton (Cambridgeshire) and Malvern (Worcestershire) are the first two communities to have registered more than 1000 votes.


As it stands BT claims to have received more than 200,000 votes from communities across the UK. The ISP is also pledging to engage with any area not winning the competition where at least 75% of homes and businesses (with at least 1,000 supporters) have voted for super-fast broadband.

BT hopes to have made super-fast broadband available to 4 million premises by the end 2010 (40% of UK homes), but it will still have more than 12 million further premises to reach as part of its plan to deliver "fibre broadband" to two thirds (66%) of the UK by 2015.

However critics of the competition claim that BT is only doing this to help promote its own service, while others have pointing out that the 1,000 vote's threshold automatically excludes a significant portion of rural areas.