BT to roll out FTTH/FTTC to 10 million homes by 2012
BT have today announced plans to roll out a £1.5bn investment in fibre based high speed broadband offering a range of services with top speeds of up to 100Mbps. Headline speeds of “more than 1,000Mb/s in the future” are also mentioned in the BT announcement.
The full press release sets out the financial details and explains that BT will cease its share buyback programme as part of the funding package (Click here for the full press release).
The program will be a mixture of Fibre to the home (FTTH) in new build developments (such as Ebbsfleet) and Fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) elsewhere, with the deployment being “demand driven” and not confined to cities. BT’s campaign based approach to rolling out broadband during 2003 and 2004 was very successful, so we may see another initiative along these lines.
Technical details are scarce at the moment, but BT have indicated that they would make the service available via wholesale channels as well. The FTTH (aka FTTP) service is set to deliver 100Mbps headline speeds, whereas the the FTTC system for existing homes will deliver up to 40Mbps initially (with a potential rise to 60Mbps being discussed). The programme aims to deliver the new services to 10 million homes by 2012.
There is the usual caveat of “The right regulatory environment is vital for anyone seeking to invest”, looking to OFCOM to come up with a regime that allows BT an economic return on the investment. Only last week Ofcom indicated their support for major telcos rolling out fibre optic broadband services.
Whilst the figure £1.5bn is vastly less than the £18bn that a full roll out is predicted to cost, this is an extremely promising development. We’ll be watching closely for further technical and deployment details over the coming months.
