Broadband News
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BT Wholesale releases WBC activation dates for first 868 exchanges
29 Mar 2008 | 09.45 Europe/London
BT Wholesale have at last released the schedule for the first 868 exchanges to be activated for Wholesale Broadband Connect, their new 21CN broadband product. The new product will bring ADSL2+ nationwide, but may take until 2012 to reach the most remote areas of the UK.
At present we're seeing 39 exchanges enabled for WBC already, and a further 829 exchanges which have RFS (Ready For Service) dates. The dates are already being shown on our exchange pages, so just search for your exchange and look for the "21CN WBC status" field to see when your exchange will go live.
As promised by BT, there will be 82 exchanges live when WBC launches on 30 April, followed by 540 exchanges by 18 November 2008 and finally 868 by 19 May 2009. A map depicting the spread of the roll out can be found here. The final figure of 868 correlates almost precisely with the figure of 869 that BT published at the start of the year. Therefore it would seem that this is the complete roll out until May 2009.
Of course, whilst we now have the activation dates for BT Wholesale's new ADSL2+ service, we now need the ISPs to announce their products that will run over WBC. Few ISPs have publicly committed to utilising WBC to date and no products have been formally announced. This is most likely due to the fact that BT Wholesale have yet to release the final pricing for all of the WBC components. This should be completed within the next couple of weeks, so one would expect product announcements from the ISPs to follow soon after.
The original list of WBC availability dates is available at btwholesale.com. BT had originally planned to announce the availability schedule on 1 April, but perhaps perhaps decided that making an announcement on April Fools day was a bit too risky!
At present we're seeing 39 exchanges enabled for WBC already, and a further 829 exchanges which have RFS (Ready For Service) dates. The dates are already being shown on our exchange pages, so just search for your exchange and look for the "21CN WBC status" field to see when your exchange will go live.
As promised by BT, there will be 82 exchanges live when WBC launches on 30 April, followed by 540 exchanges by 18 November 2008 and finally 868 by 19 May 2009. A map depicting the spread of the roll out can be found here. The final figure of 868 correlates almost precisely with the figure of 869 that BT published at the start of the year. Therefore it would seem that this is the complete roll out until May 2009.
Of course, whilst we now have the activation dates for BT Wholesale's new ADSL2+ service, we now need the ISPs to announce their products that will run over WBC. Few ISPs have publicly committed to utilising WBC to date and no products have been formally announced. This is most likely due to the fact that BT Wholesale have yet to release the final pricing for all of the WBC components. This should be completed within the next couple of weeks, so one would expect product announcements from the ISPs to follow soon after.
The original list of WBC availability dates is available at btwholesale.com. BT had originally planned to announce the availability schedule on 1 April, but perhaps perhaps decided that making an announcement on April Fools day was a bit too risky!