Category: Wholesale

Openreach has announced a trial period for a 330/30 Mbps full fibre (FTTP) service, and an 80/20 Mbps service to match the FTTC product speeds. A soft launch being expected in June 2012.

The FTTC and FTTP fibre products from Openreach are now available to one third of premises in Cornwall, and people are signing up at a rate of 250 per week.

Openreach is boosting the number of engineers to help it keep to its superfast broadband roll-out timetable.

BT Wholesale is trialling the L2 lower power mode for its ADSL2 and ADSL2+ services, which has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of broadband services.

Around 11.15am there was an outage that affected a number of providers who use the BT Wholesale WBC platform.

With the roll-out of any service there will always be those that feel agrieved at being missed out, but something of the scale of the Openreach FTTC programme is revealed by the number of cabinets that will be installed.

Delays to individual cabinets as part of the Openreach fibre roll-outs are not uncommon, but it is not totally clear if throwing more engineers at the task would resolve this, though an ex-BT executive claims there is a shortage.

Phase 9b of the Openreach superfast broadband roll-out has had a batch of exchanges announced, which should be providing service in the Spring of 2013.

What is next generation broadband depends on what you already have, and for many people still on an up to 8 Mbps service, ADSL2+ is the only real chance of a speed improvement for the next year or two.

The trials for the up to 80 Mbps download and up to 20 Mbps upload FTTC service from Openreach will end in April 2012, with the full product launch.