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BT to pump £1.5bn into broadband [UK]

edesignuk

edesignuk

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Mar 25, 2002
19,232
2
London, England
BT is to invest £1.5bn in fibre optic cables, giving up to 10 million UK households access to faster broadband.

The plans would bring 40% of homes in reach of an ultra-fast service by 2012.

BT is also planning to put fibre-optic cable into about 1 million homes, making the service even faster for those customers.

However, the communications group has made clear it will only make the move if regulator Ofcom allows it to get a decent return on that investment.

Remaining customers would be offered broadband speeds of between 40 and 60 megabits a second (mbps), it said.

In order to pay for the project BT has said it will suspend its £2.5bn share buy-back programme in July - by which time it will have returned more than £1.8bn.
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BBC.

Please promise us we'll have a good strong strangle hold and will be free to charge what we like for years to come, kthx?

meh, it's good news, but it's not. The government should fibre the country and lease it back to private firms to run it all IMO </ill thought out but seemingly sensible enough on the face of it idea>.
 
Thank god for that. We still struggle to get 0.4mb around here, yet we still pay the same line rental as others who get 2mb+.

I hope this isn't the same service they trialed a few months ago though. While it is miles faster than what we have already, it's still lagging behind worldwide average broadband speeds by quite some bit I believe.
 
It'll never happen. They may get the speeds they say but only a select few will see it.

I'm happy as Virginmedia have just bumped my 4mb connection to 10mb and it's about £14. Even at peak times I get good reliable speeds.
 
I believe this is in response to Sky who are also planning (and infact secretly testing down south) to do the same thing. Its all to do with long term profits. Broadband speeds are pretty much at maximum speed now when being sent through phone lines. The only way to keep speeds increasing and pleasing the demands of the consumer is fibre optics.

Sky (and now BT with the looks of things) want to catch up to Virgin Media in the fibre optics department to try and level the playing field in the future. If not Virgin Media will be free to offer higher speeds at much cheaper prices than Sky, BT etc and become the market leader. Something no one wants because I have just left Virgin because the service was crap since it became Virgin. At present IIRC Virgin offer a 20Mb service via fibre optics.
 
There seems to have been a big move forward recently in broadband technologies.

Here in Ireland (which typically lags waaay behind the UK, and everywhere else, in broadband) several providers have 20Mbps services, and one (Magnet) rolls out a 50Mbps consumer service throughout Dublin and parts of the east coast this month.

So, I reckon this is pretty plausible.
 
bartelby said:
They're testing 50mb+ (planning 100mb too) speeds at the moment.
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I thought they finished the pilot testing a while back in winter. Some areas around London got 100mb piped through. AFAIK, Virgin are supposed to be rolling out the 50mb service already. Might need new modems, though, so it won't be an automatic upgrade of the 20mb service..
 
We're lucky enough to get 2mbps here, even though every since phone line tester and even BT themselves said we'd only be getting 512kbps. Either way it's a drop in the ocean compared to my aunt and uncle; they live up on them there hills and still get 7mbps. The router status said it was an ADSL2+ line as well... thought they were limited to city slickers.

I can see this being good for even us rural folk, but 2012? Ouch.
 
edesignuk said:
The government should fibre the country and lease it back to private firms to run it all IMO </ill thought out but seemingly sensible enough on the face of it idea>.
Click to expand...


This seems like the sensible choice to me. The firms then pay a small amount of "upkeep tax" to the government for the privilege to use it.

P.S. Maybe they (the government) could hold an auction like they did, way back when, with the 3G network?
 
40% coverage and no doubt it will be the 40% which already has access to ADSL2+ services from O2, Sky etc.

I am sick of the broadband divide in this country. My exchange has no LLU providers whatsoever, while others can have five or six.
 
HAAA HAAA HAAAAH BWHAAA many thanks edesignUK for providing me with the best joke of the day - and it's only 9am!

BT have been talking about fiber to the home for at least 15 years - I have BT vision discussion papers from 1995 which talk about the same thing.

I have as little to do with BT as possible, unfortunately I'm reliant on a BT text-relay service for deaf people, which is at least 10 years behind similar services in the USA. And BT have resisted any changes in the law which would make is easier for competiting, deaf-run, companies to set up their own better quality text-relay services.

Note that BT are only finally talking about maybe possibly doing fth (with government help, and a relaxing of financial issues) now that other companies have managed to scrape together the capital and penetration (with BT fighting every inch of the way) to start their own projects.
 
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