BT’s Openreach fiber division is striving to reach 25 million locations across the U.K. by 2026, but in the interim the operator is tapping mobile technology to give enterprise copper customers a speed boost.
This week, BT unveiled a new Hybrid Speed Boost product for business broadband users, which it said is capable of doubling average download speeds from 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps. The product delivers an even greater bump for upload speeds, increasing these as much as 10X to 10 Mbps.
Chris Sims, MD of BT’s Small Office-Home Office business unit, told Fierce Hybrid Speed Boost uses Multipath TCP technology from vendor Tessares. This allows TCP-based traffic to be spread over multiple connections, in this case fixed copper and 4G mobile.
“By sharing traffic in this way, it allows us to increase the speed/bandwidth available for the customer,” he explained. “For example, if a customer gets 5Mbps via the Fixed Connection and up to 40Mbps via the Mobile Connection, then they could potentially receive an overall speed of up to 45Mbps under perfect conditions.”
Performance of the Speed Boost product depends on mobile signal strength. “Generally, the better the signal strength, the better the Boost performance will be,” Sims said. He added the speed contribution from the mobile side of its network is currently capped at a rate of 40 Mbps both upstream and down, and there are no current plans to increase this.
A footnote in BT’s press release about the new product notes the speed boost only works for TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) web traffic. While this will cover the majority of traffic, it means other types such as UDP (User Datagram Protocol) that are used for things like gaming and VPN services will not see speeds increase.
Hybrid Speed Boost is being offered for free to BT business broadband customers. If customers don’t already have the required hardware to take advantage of it, it will be provided when they order the service, Sims said.
In the U.S., Charter Communications appears to have implemented something similar to boost speeds for mobile customers, though it’s unclear exactly what technology it’s using. The operator indicated its new Speed Boost product will allow its Spectrum Mobile customers to tap into Wi-Fi connections to get speeds of up to 1 Gbps.