BT Shows First Fiber-Optic Broadband Rollout Plans 119
MJackson writes "BT has revealed new details about the roll-out of its £1.5bn programme to deploy super fast fibre optic broadband to as many as 10 million UK homes (40%) by 2012. Scotland will become one of the first places to benefit from next-generation broadband services, with more than 34,000 homes and businesses in Edinburgh and Glasgow receiving speeds of up to 40Mbps and potentially 60Mbps from early next year (2010). Overall, BT Openreach, which is responsible for ensuring that all rival operators have equality of access to BT's local network, aims to deploy Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) based next generation broadband services next summer (2010) to 500,000 homes and businesses in the UK."
What do we need the bandwidth for? (Score:5, Interesting)
If P2P is illegal - and frankly any internet traffic seems to be illegal according to the Orwellian UK government at the moment, what are we going to use 60Mbps for - checking Email?
Mind you, 60Mbps is really going to improve the performance of the botnets, so spam levels will go up.
Good for Bittorrent? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What do we need the bandwidth for? (Score:5, Interesting)
iPlayer streams are around 1Mb/s. Given the availability of fast enough consumer links, I wouldn't be surprised if the BBC started streaming the shows with the same format they broadcast them, which can eat up 20Mb/s easily. Two people in the house watching different streams? That's 40Mb/s. Download a big file in the background and you've got your 60Mb/s right there.
I doubt many people will be using 60Mb/s all of the time, but then I don't use all of the 10Mb/s I get now all of the time either (and if I did, my ISP couldn't afford to give me the service at the rate that they do).
Available in certain areas in the Netherlands now (Score:2, Interesting)
Some cities in the Netherlands already have broadband fibre options for residential connections. Living in one of the pilot areas in Amsterdam, I am currently enjoying 20 Mbit/s (symmetrical!), but could go up to 100 Mbit/s (also symmetrical) if I'm willing to pay more.
Internet service can be combined with telephone and radio/TV. RTV is converted to old fashioned cable signal in your home, which with good cabling (and proper channel separation (which they did take care of)) gives excellent TV image quality, without slow channel switching, digital artefacts, and one-TV-only downsides typical for other digital TV services.
The good thing is (IMHO) they separated the network itself from the service providers, so you can have your choice of who (and what) you pay for. I'm just getting internet, because the TV package is missing BBC1 and 2 due to stupid monopoly of the old fashioned cable companies.
Re:Virgin Media UK already provides 50Mbit fiber o (Score:3, Interesting)
I once made a complaint to the ASA (Advertising Standards Association) but it was not upheld because apparently the average consumer would not draw that conclusion.
Fiber to the Cabinet? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"super fast fibre optic broadband"?!? (Score:1, Interesting)
Agreed.
I live in France and I get 30 Mbit/s for 22 per month, and there's not a single strand of fiber in my home or building, it's all over old school coax cable.
The cable company also offers 100 Mbit/s at the same price for areas where they did deploy FTTB, which is still not "super fast fibre optic" but still a nice improvement.