Broadband News
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ISPs Join BT FTTC Trials
05 Jun 2009 | 16.10 Europe/London
A number of internet service providers (ISPs) have this week announced that they will take part in BT's fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) trials. This involves the installation of electronics in roadside cabinets in order to minimise the length of the copper loop. By doing so the fastest DSL technologies like VDSL can be used to deliver speeds in excess of the current ADSL2+ ceiling of 24 Mbits/s.
VDSL has more flexibility to provide faster upstream speeds at the expense of download speed depending on the profile chosen, typical top-end limits for the technology are 85M downstream and 18M upstream. In practice these speeds will be reduced by the need to avoid conflict with other services (including ADSL) operating on adjacent copper loops.
BT are calling their FTTC service "up to 40 Mbits/s" presumably to fit nicely with the "up to 20 Mbits/s" ADSL2+ services that have also been in the news this week. The FTTC ‘customer trials’ will run from 1st July 2009 for a period of up to 6 months from the BT exchanges at Muswell Hill (London) and, shortly afterwards, at Whitchurch (Cardiff). The trial configuration is reported to be up to 40Mbits/s downstream and up to 2Mbits/s upstream with an option to increase the upstream up to 5Mbits/s.
As always, faster end user link speed will only deliver faster sustained throughputs if the rest of the network is dimensioned to match and if the services offerred are priced at a level to fund the requisite network capacity. Otherwise it will be an interesting burst speed product to compete with cable broadband but not a revolution in end user access.
Entanet and Griffin Internet are two of the announced trial participants, both of whom operate through resellers.
VDSL has more flexibility to provide faster upstream speeds at the expense of download speed depending on the profile chosen, typical top-end limits for the technology are 85M downstream and 18M upstream. In practice these speeds will be reduced by the need to avoid conflict with other services (including ADSL) operating on adjacent copper loops.
BT are calling their FTTC service "up to 40 Mbits/s" presumably to fit nicely with the "up to 20 Mbits/s" ADSL2+ services that have also been in the news this week. The FTTC ‘customer trials’ will run from 1st July 2009 for a period of up to 6 months from the BT exchanges at Muswell Hill (London) and, shortly afterwards, at Whitchurch (Cardiff). The trial configuration is reported to be up to 40Mbits/s downstream and up to 2Mbits/s upstream with an option to increase the upstream up to 5Mbits/s.
As always, faster end user link speed will only deliver faster sustained throughputs if the rest of the network is dimensioned to match and if the services offerred are priced at a level to fund the requisite network capacity. Otherwise it will be an interesting burst speed product to compete with cable broadband but not a revolution in end user access.
Entanet and Griffin Internet are two of the announced trial participants, both of whom operate through resellers.