SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 TheRaven on Monday February 05 2018, @12:08PM
This depends a lot on the kind of copper (coax cable can run a lot faster than telephone pairs), the length of the copper (inverse square laws suck) and what's at the far end.
The BT fibre is rated for 1Gb/s, but currently the fastest plan that they sell is 300Mb/s, because the termination equipment at both ends is more expensive if they support faster connections and there's little market for it now, so they can put off the upgrade until the equipment is cheap and then impress everyone by going from 300Mb/s to 1Gb/s. It's worth noting that there are basically two physical network providers in the UK: BT OpenReach and Virgin Media (the result of all of the local cable companies merging). The goal of OpenReach is to be able to advertise a faster speed than Virgin. Until recently, Virgin only offered 200Mb/s (and not on most of their network). They're now offering 300Mb/s, though I'm not sure what the coverage is (presumably the bits that have been upgraded to DOCSIS 3.0 and don't have too long cable runs). Expect them to offer 1Gb/s when Virgin starts offering something similar.
sudo mod me up