The Chief Executive (CEO) of BT Group, Ian Livingston, has today told the UK governments Prime Minister, David Cameron, and his cabinet that the telecoms operator aims to "largely eradicate" the UK's internet access "Slow spots" and make superfast broadband ISP speeds of 100Mbps plus available "to most homes".

The comments were today made during an official visit by Cameron and the cabinet to BT's R&D HQ at Adastral Park (Suffolk). BT's chief also repeated the operator's aim of brining its superfast broadband services to 90% of the country by 2016 or 2017.

Livingston also claimed that the number of homes unable to achieve more than 2Mbps was set to plummet from 12% today to less than 2% over a similar period of time.


BT's "broadband vision" includes a number of caveats that are worth exploring in more detail. Firstly, the 90% target is strictly reliant upon match-funding with most of the government's Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office budget (£530m until 2015; could rise to £830m by 2017), which is by no means guaranteed and has yet to be decided by tender.

Secondly, the aim of 100Mbps+ for "most homes" will sadly not be met by BT's truly fibre optic Fibre-to-the-Premises ( FTTP ) technology, which could deliver speeds of 1Gbps or more. Instead it will mostly come from upgrades to the inferior Fibre-to-the-Cabinet ( FTTC ), which offers speeds of up to 40Mbps and is currently being upgraded to 80Mbps (here).

The use of crosstalk busting vectoring solutions will in the near future push FTTC beyond 100Mbps. However being covered by a 100Mbps capable technology and actually receiving said speeds are two different things. Speeds will drop off sharply after 400 metres from your street cabinet.

Still, FTTC, if you can get it, will remain significantly better than today's dire ADSL / ADSL2+ based broadband solutions. As a result the most important problem for the market to resolve will be one of ensuring adequate flexibility and competition between ISPs. At present the lack of a truly comparable unbundled solution for LLU has made it harder for third party ISPs to compete.

Separately BT has today signed US firm Ciena to help boost the capacity of its 21st Century Network (21CN) with new optical equipment. This should enable core speeds of up to 100Gbps by using different wavelengths of light over their fibre optic lines. Work on the upgrades is due to begin before the end of December 2011 and will help to support the rising demand for bandwidth from both consumers and businesses.