BT to upgrade further exchanges with fibre network

BT has announced that it is upgrading another 73 exchanges to its fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) broadband fibre technology.

The FTTC service is expected to deliver downstream speeds of up to 80Mb/s and upstream speeds of 20Mb/s to homes around the country within a few months. However none of these exchanges will be upgraded to its fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network yet, which is expected to deliver speeds of around 330Mb/s.

The upgrades will eventually allow customers - mainly SMEs - to opt into BT’s new FTTP on-demand service from spring 2013. The project, which will involve upgrading a large number of exchanges to its new faster broadband, will cost BT a total of £2.5 billion. The current upgrade scheme is intended to deliver faster broadband through FTTC to around 75 per cent of its customers, with the remaining quarter being lucky enough to receive the super-fast broadband through the FTTP network.

A BT spokesperson talked to The Register about the upgrades, explaining: "With this announcement we have now reported exchanges covering almost 16 million homes and businesses in the UK.”

"This means that we have nearly completed the announcement of our commercial footprint of approximately two thirds of the UK premises by the end of 2014."

BT has been working hard, along with other telcos, to secure some of the funding put aside by the government to help the ‘final third’ of the UK gain access to decent broadband connections. The pot of cash is worth £530 million and is intended to help the rural regions so far overlooked by BT’s cables, to access the broadband speeds that the rest of the UK enjoys.

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