Posted: 13th Jan, 2012 By: MarkJ

Broadband ISP Andrews & Arnold ( AAISP ) has just provided some of the first public
feedback from its technical trials of the latest 'up to'
80Mbps superfast
Fibre-to-the-Cabinet ( FTTC ) broadband technology. Customers on AAISP's trial have apparently experienced sync speeds of
between 57Mbps - 79.7Mbps and most have managed the get a
strong upload rate of around 20Mbps.
BT announced that it planned to upgrade the maximum download speed of FTTC from 40Mbps (10-15Mbps uploads) to 80Mbps (20Mbps uploads) last May 2011 (
here). The official
registered pilot phase is due to begin on
6th February 2012, when more customers will be allowed to join (
details). The service will then be rolled out nationally.
AAISP's Director, Adrian Kennard, said:
"Seems the trial is not going badly - the lines are syncing up at nice high rates, and the rates are correctly coming through to us.
Seems a few minor teething troubles getting the profiles right in the middle somewhere - but this is a technical trial, so not at all surprising."
The upgrade itself, which involves increasing FTTC's
spectrum allocation (from 7MHz to 17MHz) within the
Access Network Frequency Plan (ANFP), is relatively simple and does not require any new hardware (i.e. no extra cost).
A similar upgrade in the future could
push top speeds to 100Mbps and possibly further if
vectoring is used to help cut out cross-talk (
interference), although the latter solution would come at an extra cost.