The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of business ISP Timico UK, Trefor Davies, has revealed that BTWholesale has begun efforts to phase out its older generation of 'up to' 8Mbps ADSL (ADSLMAX) broadband technologies and its related 20CN (20th Century Network) based IPStream and Datastream products.

Today a growing number of BT based ISPs have since swapped onto the operates latest 21CN (21st Century Network) platform, which supports 'up to' 24Mbps ADSL2+ technology and BT's latest superfast 'up to' 40Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet ( FTTC ) products. At present BT's 21CN platform covers about 75% of the country (serving some 20 million customers).

The phasing out of ADSLMAX related services is certainly not unexpected, especially after they did something similar before when the older fixed-speed 512Kbps, 1Mbps and 2Mbps products were suddenly withdrawn. Since then it has also become more expensive for ISPs to offer 20CN / ADSLMAX based services.


Davies claims that BT expects to have completed the withdrawals/migrations by the spring of 2014, which means that the vast majority of those still stuck on 8Mbps capable 20CN platforms are likely to get an upgrade to at least the new ADSL2+ based solutions.

It's further understood that BT has also begun discussions with the industry on the fate of 2Mbps business focused SDSL technology, which in a growing market of Ethernet and Fibre solutions was beginning to look like a dinosaur.

UPDATE 12:49pm

The Thinkbroadband site has managed to gain a clarification. Apparently only BT's Datastream 20CN product is being withdrawn nationwide, while the primary IPStream service will only be removed from BT's latest 21CN platform and not its older 20CN one (a tad confusing, perhaps).

In other words, some people look set to stay stuck on 'up to' 8Mbps 20CN connections for awhile. However, it should be said that BT will eventually want to withdraw those too, but probably not for awhile.