BT to offer "on demand" fibre optic broadband

After successful trials of fibre to the premise (FTTP) broadband in St Agnes Cornwall, BT has committed to offering speeds of up to 300Mbs on demand by 2013. This is three times faster than the current 100Mbps speed available with BT and the company hopes to create a "mass market" for high speed broadband among small and medium sized businesses.

Mike Galvin of Openreach, part of the BT group, said: “By December 2014, two thirds of the country will have access to ultra-fast fibre if they want it."

This super speed may come at a price though as current fibre optics connections are widespread to street cabinets, but not directly to users’ homes and businesses. The current cabling directly to premises (usually copper cable) would need to be replaced with fibre optic to deliver the promised speeds. BT stated that this connection cost could be hundreds of pounds and depending on what the ISP's and broadband providers are willing to contribute to the cost, some or all of the connection fees could be passed on to the end user.

So ultra-fast 300Mbps broadband may not quite be affordable for the masses when it is first rolled out, but as the infrastructure grows costs could come down and many providers may feel it's worth taking the hit to provide customers with the fastest broadband in the UK.

The new technology has enabled BT to re-engineer their network and with more and more improvements heading our way with some providers testing speeds of up to 1Gigabit per second, the UK broadband network is getting better and better. With the big broadband providers aiming to have the fastest and most reliable broadband and competition to get consumers to sign up with them, the home users will eventually see ultra-fast broadband become affordable.