BT announces broadband strategy

BT Wholesale yesterday announced plans to trial a 1Mbps consumer ADSL service this autumn.

The announcement was part of BT’s presentation to ISPs at its broadband customer forum in London, where it announced an array of pilots and trial schemes.

Its premium 1Mbps service will be joined by a slower entry-level product; prices and other details of which will be announced this summer. Meanwhile ISP Telewest yesterday revealed its plans to launch a 2Mbps consumer service later this year.

As well as increasing the range of consumer packages, BT announced plans to extend the geographical coverage of its asymmetrical digital subscriber line (ADSL) services to cater for an extra 600,000 households.

Its current ADSL services only have a reach of 5.5km, after which signal reduction occurs. But BT is convinced it can extend this to 6km while still providing a good 512Kbps. This will mean that 97 per cent of households currently connected to ADSL-enabled exchanges will be within reach. The proposed launch will be this June.

BT is also considering a ‘simple fix’ solution, which would use copper cables so that people who are connected to their local exchanges via optical fibre, which does not support ADSL, could get broadband. Further details will be published in April.

The company took time to give itself a pat on the back for its broadband registration scheme, which has attracted interest from 300,000 people so far. The latest trigger figures, due for release on Mar. 31 will show a further 102 exchanges (on top of the current 35) have been upgraded.

Finally, BT announced an extension to its current symmetric digital subscriber line (SDSL) trials, bringing the number of test exchanges from 22 to 100 by May.

BT now has around 750,000 broadband subscribers bringing it on target for its deadline of one million by this summer.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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