BT (NYSE: BT) plans to increase the speed of its Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) service from 40 Mbps to 80 Mbps and upload speeds up to 20 Mbps in 2012.
Given the distance limitations to copper-based technologies like VDSL2 and ADSL2+ that will carry the service over a copper pair from the cabinet to the customer, a BT spokesman said the upgrade will be available to a portion of its existing FTTC customers.
"Most customers within the existing footprint will get a higher speed," said the spokesman. "There will be a very small number of customers who have very long lines who won't benefit as the additional speed is generated by using higher frequencies and those frequencies do not work on long lines."
Just as the momentum for FTTH and fiber-based business services continues to rise, squeezing more bandwidth out of existing copper has continued to stay in fashion with the advent of VDSL2 and other advanced techiques including Dynamic Spectrum management, phantom mode technology and vectoring, all of which claim can deliver speeds of up to 100 Mbps.
What's interesting about BT's FTTC speed upgrade is that it comes not long after Fujitsu revealed its intention to work with UK-based alternative providers TalkTalk (LSE: TALK) and Virgin Media (Nasdaq: VMED) and vendor Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) to build a 1 Gbps-capable open access FTTH network.
While BT has mainly favored FTTC for Brownfield, or existing service areas, it has been rolling out FTTH in Greenfield areas and is testing a 1 Gbps service in 2012.
For more:
- silicon.com has this article
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