Posted: 01st Jul, 2011 By: MarkJ

UK ISP BT is expected to launch a new
Sub-15Mbps capable
Faster Total Broadband Option 3 package early next week. The package will be made available to customers on FTTC enabled lines that aren't able to get download speeds of above 15Mbps, usually because they live too far from their local street cabinet.
BT's standard BT-Infinity
Fibre-to-the-Cabinet based product typically promotes "
super-fast" speeds of 'up to' 40Mbps, although this comes with a
Fault Threshold of 15Mbps (i.e. anything below that speed is considered a fault). That's because the "
last mile" of connectivity between street cabinets and homes is carried over existing copper cable and VDSL2 technology, which is still susceptible to line length related interference.
The result of this is that many homes (
6% of FTTC's current national footprint) have a telephone line that supports FTTC but may have been unable to order it because their service performance would have fallen below BT's Fault Threshold.
Last year BT moved to resolve this by
introducing a second Fault Threshold (
here), which allows for
download speeds of between 5Mbps and 15Mbps (i.e. anything under 5Mbps would now be considered a fault). BT's new
Faster Total Broadband Option 3 has thus been designed around the new Threshold.
Naturally BT doesn't want to "
de-value" their existing BT-Infinity package and as a result its new service will only show on pre-sales once a customer has completed a speed check. Likewise it will
only be available alongside one dual play package (
Unlimited Broadband and Calls).
Admittedly 5Mbps to 15Mbps is slower than some ADSL2+ lines, although most of those affected will already be experiencing even lower speeds and can also benefit from the faster upstream performance and lower latency.