BT has announced that the coverage of its "advanced copper broadband" service, which currently offers internet download speeds of up to 20Mbps via ADSL2+ technology, will be significantly extended from 80% of the UK (20 million premises) to 90% (22.5 million) during Spring 2013.

At present telephone exchanges that serve more than 17.6 million premises (homes and businesses) have already been enabled and an additional 800 exchanges will need to be upgraded to reach the new total. It's understood that more than 400 of those are located in rural areas and serve over 900,000 premises.


BT claims to have "invested significant amounts" installing broadband in almost every one of its 5,500 UK telephone exchanges. Sadly it's also the only choice for many rural areas, although TalkTalk plans to extend its ADSL2+ capable unbundled ( LLU ) network from 80% (today) to "nearly 90% of the population" within the next year or so.


As BT expands its footprint for ADSL2+ broadband it will gradually withdraw its legacy broadband products, such as the 8Mbps IPstream ADSL service, by Spring 2014 (original news). The above services are not to be confused with BT's rollout of superfast 'up to' 40Mbps FTTC and 100Mbps+ FTTP fibre optic broadband technology, which should cover 66% of the UK population in 2015.