BT has announced the roll out of its (up to 100Mb) fibre to the home (FTTH) network will reach twice as many homes as previously estimated.
BT Openreach, which is overseeing the fibre roll out, estimated last year that 1m households would have access to the fibre to the home (FTTH) network by 2012. It now [...]

BT is trialling technology it claims can deliver a stable 1Mb service over a 12km line. This, it claims, more than doubles the capabilities of copper which normally cannot support broadband on a line more than 5km from an exchange.
The Broadband Enabling Technology (BET) has already provided a stable 1Mb service to homes 12km away [...]

Yesterday’s news about FTTH created a stir, but what might a fibre service cost ?
Part of the answer is already in the public domain, from BT Openreach and BT Wholesale announcements relating to the Ebbsfleet pilot.
The fibre connection charge will be £130 and the monthly rental for a 10Mbits/s downstream (bursting to 30M) service will [...]

Sky (Easynet) are reportedly trialling a Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) system in East London, which according to ZDnet doesn’t involve any customers but is more of a “proof of concept” trial of sub-loop unbundling (SLU).
SLU involves Openreach making available tie pairs at the street cabinet level, allowing 3rd party operators to connect ADSL or [...]

BT’s patent pending iPlate is becoming available to end users via Ebay (search for iPlate) and at least one ISP.
The iPlate is a slot-in “interstitial” filter that fits between the faceplate of a BT master socket (type NTE5) and the backplate that is screwed to the wall. It filters out potential interference from the bell [...]

South Derbyshire District Council have for some time now being raising questions about the standard of broadband provision in their district and challenging BT to address the problem.
Using our exchange checker we can see that three of the exchanges in the area (Swadlincote, Peartree and Mickleover) have a full set of LLU services so there [...]

The BBC News website reports criticism by analyst Ian Fogg that BT Openreach’s forthcoming fibre trial at Ebbsfleet will be “too slow”. He opines that a trial should use the fastest technology available.
BT are of course trialling the product they plan to launch as opposed to running trials on the fibre technology itself. Their FTTH [...]

BT’s Home IT support service has added a new service to improve broadband speeds – the Broadband Accelerator.
The service, available here, is available only to those who take both a phone line and broadband from BT Retail (i.e. have BT Total Broadband).
For £90 an engineer will visit and spend up to one hour working to [...]

OFCOM have opened a consultation looking at the future pricing structure for BT’s Openreach division.
Openreach owns and runs the BT “local loop” copper network and charges other divisions of BT and other operators for use of the lines. As the local loop is an effective monopoly the pricing is regulated by OFCOM.
Currently the prices charged [...]

BT Wholsale’s launch of FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) at the new Ebbsfleet valley housing development kicks off this Autumn. Whilst a rough product line-up has been in the public domain for some time, this is the first time we’ve seen any pricing information from them.
The following table summarises both the products and prices on [...]

The growth of local loop unbundling (LLU) in the past 18 months has undoubtedly been explosive. In the last quarter alone there were over 600,000 LLU connections provisioned. But all of this growth is taking its toll on the physical capacity of the exchanges themselves. Indeed, many exchanges in London now have nearly ten separate [...]

Be Unlimited have this morning announced plans to expand their network by nearly 400 exchanges within the next four months. This represents a 50% increase in their exchange footprint and will give them the second largest LLU network in the UK. Their 1245 unbundled exchanges will be trumped only by TalkTalk’s 1645. Be’s network of [...]

On Thursday afternoon, Be (owned by O2) announced to their members that they could no longer accept new orders for customers on the Poplar exchange. This may seem rather unimportant at first glance, but the reason behind it is actually quite interesting.
According to Brett Coles, Head of Member Services at Be, the root issue is [...]

The brand new Haydon Wick exchange finally came online this week after repeated delays. The exchange has been built to “accommodate growth in the area following commencement of a significant building development” (See original BT Openreach announcement from April).
About 2500 lines are being transferred from the neighbouring Blunsdon exchange. The following phone number prefixes will [...]

Have you heard about 21CN but are not really sure what it’s all about? If so, you’re not alone. We receive quite a lot of email from users confused about how 21CN will affect them and what new products it will bring.
With the national migration to 21CN starting in just a few months, we’ve put [...]

Today seems to of been a busy day for some of the LLU providers.
Wanadoo remove two exchanges from the unbundling rollout plan, these unlucky exchanges are Almondsbury and Waltham Cross. Seven exchanges have been pushed back from 30/04/06 to 31/07/06 these can be found here
Be Unlimited released another exchange today, Woodford This brings the total [...]