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Openreach, the BT-owned firm that manages the UK's broadband infrastructure, has vowed to introduce "ultrafast" internet connections to three million premises by 2020. The company said it was accelerating its plan to run fibre connections directly to homes and businesses. It will increase internet speeds from 24 megabits a second under superfast broadband to 100 megabits. The first phase will begin this year, targeting eight cities across the UK.
[...] Too little, too late. That is how BT's many critics will characterise the plan to bring full fibre connections into as many as 10 million homes by 2025. They have always argued that the UK should have opted long ago for a national future-proof fibre-to-the-home network. Instead, BT's approach has been to lay fibre to cabinets on the street and then rely on good old copper cables to take broadband into the home.
[...] with the government switching tack and insisting "full fibre" is now the answer, BT has seen the light - though as its statement makes clear the speed of the rollout will depend on an "acceptable" return on its investment.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday February 05 2018, @03:02AM (1 child)
If they believe that "full fiber speed" is 100Mbit, I worry about the size of the pipe serving that cabinet.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday February 05 2018, @09:56AM
> If they believe that "full fiber speed" is 100Mbit, I worry about the size of the pipe serving that cabinet.
Tell me about it. I feel that this is more a PR stunt then anything else. Pretty much most parts of the UK have fiber to the cabinet already, which is then split off into ADSL.
Most likely, all they would do is upgrade the "last mile" to fiber, and then we all get a line speed of "100mbit/s" or whatever, and think "teh awesomeness", whereas we are still just all getting shunted down a single gigabit line or something. So you will rarely (if ever) get the actual advertised speed, unless you pay a lot of money for a business line (which tend to have lower contention ratios of around 10:1 in these parts)
So yes, it will say "100mbit/s" on my router, but I doubt I will actually get that kind of performance. They would need to upgrade the last mile, then upgrade all the backhaul links to take possibly 10x the original traffic. Maybe they will do this, but I won't be holding my breath.