BT Wholesale continues its 21CN ADSL2+ roll-out
Monday 20 August 2012 10:30:24 by Andrew Ferguson

ADSL2+ has been available in the UK for many years now, and TalkTalk leads the way in terms of national coverage with their service available to around 93% of UK homes. BT Wholesale is rolling out its own ADSL2+ service, and has now caught Sky in terms of coverage with BT Wholesale offering its service to around 85% of UK properties.

The 85% figure is not the end of the story, the current plan is to increase coverage to 90% by Spring 2013. While ADSL2+ has technical maximum speed of 24 Mbps, advertising rules mean it is advertised as around 13 to 16 Mbps (the speed that at least 10% can achieve). Some are critical of the ongoing roll-out as it largely only benefits those who have a telephone line under 42dB attenuation (~3.5km), but an often overlooked benefit is that the upstream speeds double for the vast majority, from the old standard of 448 Kbps to something in the 700 to 1000 Kbps region. For those who have an ADSL service already a good estimate of your speed under ADSL2+ can be estimated using a speed calculator.

One other advantage to an exchange offering ADSL2+ from BT Wholesale is that it means the exchange supports the 21CN WBC IP backhaul, which means if Openreach was through its own commercial roll-out or a BDUK project to offer fibre services, the exchange would be ready to link the various fibre services back to the providers.

The latest update from BT Wholesale held a list of some 300 exchanges which are scheduled to get ADSL2+ from BT Wholesale, as always the caveat is that plans can change, so do treat the list with a little caution, but it should provide some hope for those looking for faster speeds.