If you receive your broadband through either of the following exchanges, now's a good time to start getting excited. BT have announced that Muswell Hill, London, and Whitchurch, South Glamorgan will be the first two opperational exchanges in their Fibre to the Cabinet ( FTTC ) scheme.The exchanges will be run by Openreach, and will be available on a wholesale basis to all other UK communication providers, hence reaching the public almost as soon as the scheme goes live. Although this is a fibre scheme, the cables only run to the exchange - the final stretch from exchange to home will still use copper wires. This will still leave users with a pretty hefty (by UK standards, anyway!) 40mbps connection.
Time for Virgin to raise their game (for once).
I can, they are "soft launching" 50mbps very shortly with the aim to have most areas 50mbps enabled by year end. Beats the two exchanges BT are going to be rolling out.
Ahh, I did hear that before last year! I also heard a few years ago when Virgin bought NTL that NTL were working on a prototype 100MB line. We could be seeing that in a few years with a bit of luck!
From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/13/bt...to_the_cabinet/
David Campbell, Openreach's director of next-generation access said:
Services in these areas will be available to all UK communication providers on a wholesale basis. The sites were chosen in consultation with communications providers and took into account feedback from Regional Development Agencies, Devolved Authorities and similar organisations.
It was also necessary to take into account current network topology and our ability to run testing procedures in the chosen areas. We have a good mix of areas, allowing us to test our products in both urban and semi-rural environments. These two sites were chosen from a shortlist and we expect to announce detailed plans for the initial market deployment of the Openreach product in early 2010, again following consultation with all interested parties.
... or ...
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=76703
... and again ...
http://www.damovo.co.uk/find-out-about-BT-21CN.html
S.
For instance, if the BBC Article was the original source for this news story, would it have killed the OP to include a link to it? Especially as the BBC News article is much larger.
I've had 50/10Mbps VDSL2 service for over a year now in the suburbs of Berlin, and it's been a rock-solid service. IPTV comes bundled with it, but it sucks. But hey, for 65 EUR a month I can ignore that part and still have the best price/bps ratio on the market :^)
BTW, be prepared for components not ready for such high bandwidths: Most routers just don't have a fast enough CPU for 50/10Mbps, Windows XP and Vista require some manual tweaking so they can exploit such fast download (XP) and upload (XP/Vista) speeds, and so do a number of third party applications (such as web browsers, FTP servers, etc). When you're at the bleeding edge of bandwidth, you hit a lot of hardware and software roadblocks...
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