Business Internet Community » BT

UK broadband networks are ‘ready’ for swine flu

GI Webmaster — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:05:07 +0000

BT (Wholesale Division) is confident it can cope with the extra demands the swine flu pandemic may put on the UK’s broadband network. It follows a meeting with the Government and emergency services which raised doubts about whether the network could cope. There were concerns it could freeze as more people suspected of having the virus are encouraged to work from home.

“BT’s network is in a strong position to cope with the expected demands in home working,” the firm said in a statement.

In our opinion, the real issue will be for companies to ensure that their own computing systems are robust enough if many people are going to be remotely accessing machines in their offices. This uses both upstream and downstream capacity. What is likely to happen, is that the evening peak spike may be repeated during the day and providers that have no spare capacity now, will struggle. This could give the impression that the infrastructure is failing.

BT Reveals Plans For First Fibre Optic Broadband Rollout

GI Webmaster — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:15:58 +0000

has revealed new information about the roll-out of its £1.5bn programme to deploy super fast fibre optic (Fibre to the Premise/Cabinet, FTTP/C) broadband to as many as 10 million UK homes (40%) by 2012. Scotland will become one of the first places to benefit from early next year, with more than 34,000 homes and businesses in Edinburgh and Glasgow receiving speeds of up to 40Mbps and potentially 60Mbps.

Overall BT Openreach, which is responsible for ensuring that all rival operators have equality of access to BT’s local network, aims to deploy Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) based next generation broadband services next summer (2010) to 500,000 homes and businesses in the UK. The next set of locations, serving a further 1 million homes and businesses, will be announced in the autumn.

Steve Robertson, CEO of Openreach, told delegates at the Scottish Council Development and Industry conference in St Andrews: “Super-fast broadband is essential to Scotland’s future so it is great to announce this initial set of locations. The wider industry will now be able to plan ahead as we will be making our services available on a wholesale basis. This approach will benefit customers as there will undoubtedly be fierce competition for their business.

Once again, Scotland is at the forefront of one of the most important projects to take place in recent years. It will play a vital role in the UK’s future as a knowledge-based economy.“

First Minister, Alex Salmond, said: “Broadband is already available in 99% of Scotland and the Scottish Government is rolling out a £3.3 million project to extend affordable broadband services. This technology has quickly established itself as vital communications tool for businesses and people of all ages. This new service will give customers in two of the country’s biggest cities even greater access to the opportunities and services that the internet offers.“

Openreach will be making fibre based services available to more than 30,000 homes and businesses from exchanges serving the areas around Glasgow University and the arts galleries and in the Hillington Park innovation centre and business park development. In Edinburgh, super-fast broadband will become available to 4,000 customers in Stockbridge and the New Town.

Steve Robertson added: “We have worked very closely with industry, development agencies and local authorities to choose these sites and I would like to thank everyone who has worked with us to make this happen. We are in discussion with others so expect similar announcements in the months to come.“

BT plans to trial their latest form of FTTC technology in Muswell Hill (London) and Whitchurch in South Glamorgan this summer. FTTC essentially replaces the copper wire going to local street cabinets with a high capacity fibre optic link. VDSL or VDSL2 is then used to carry the connection over the existing (last mile) copper wire into homes, working in a faster but not hugely dissimilar way to many existing (ADSL) broadband services.

This represents the first major phase of the UK’s biggest ever investment programme in super-fast broadband. In addition BT informs us that upload speeds will also reach up to 10Mbps, which is significantly faster than the 2Mbps seen at their Ebbsfleet trials of FTTP technology. Openreach is aware there are some premises that will not be able to be served by FTTC and they are currently looking at alternative solutions for those.

Ofcom to Approve BTs £1.5bn Next Gen Broadband Network

GI Webmaster — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:39:42 +0000

Ofcom is widely expected to approve BT’s £1.5 billion programme to rollout fibre-based (Fibre to the Premise/Cabinet), super-fast broadband to as many as 10 million homes by 2012 (Bt Reveals Major £1.5bn Next-Gen Fibre Broadband Plans) on Tuesday of this coming week. The move will outline a new set of regulations, effectively allowing BT to make a return on its investment without fear of aggressive pro-competition measures.

The proposals will mark a change of stance for Ofcom, which has in the past pushed BT to be more open and flexible, often to the point of giving its rivals a potentially stronger market advantage. However the huge costs involved with rolling out a new generation of fibre optic broadband services make such a stance impossible to maintain without public funding, the latter of which does not appear to be forthcoming.

The operator will use a mix of both Fibre to the Premise (FTTP) and Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) fibre optic technology to deliver the service. FTTP is expected to see speeds of up to 100Mbps (possibly 1000Mbps in the more distant future) and will most likely only be used at newer development / building sites.

FTTC is more likely to be used as an enhancement for existing infrastructure, with VDSL2 technology being implemented to solve the last-mile copper wire run to homes. This will initially result in speeds of up to 40Mbps becoming available, potentially rising to 60Mbps with future enhancements.

However rival ISPs will not be left out in the cold, with BT making provisions to offer its new services via the wholesale channel. Precisely how flexible this will be is still open to debate, although providers should probably expect even less choice and higher costs than they may be use to.

Meanwhile Virgin Media is already busy rolling out its FTTC style up to 50Mbps cable broadband product, which should cover a significant proportion of the country by this summer. BT’s service will take considerably longer to arrive and it’s yet to even complete the significantly delayed rollout of existing old-style up to 24Mbps (ADSL2+) services.

Got a BT Business Hub? Congratulations – you just became a public wi-fi hotspot!

GI Webmaster — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:46:26 +0000

BT has begun transforming its commercial customers’ Business Hubs into OpenZone hotspots for any passing Tom, Dick or Harry to share, and leaving businesses to figure out how to opt out of the scheme after the fact.

Under the scheme, 20,000 BT Business Broadband customers have already had their hubs upgraded, with another 200,000 being seconded into the OpenZone network over the next few months.

BT has assured that everyone received a notification e-mail providing details of how to opt out of the sharing arrangement.

The e-mail sent out to business customers explains that the hub will receive an overnight upgrade, warning the user to leave it switched on and so forth, before slipping in the exciting news, at paragraph four, that following the upgrade total strangers will be able to share their bandwidth:

“After the upgrade BT Openzone will be ENABLED, offering your visitors and customers secure, public wireless internet access using your Hub as a BT Openzone wireless hotspot.”

BT reckons this is just want businesses want: they’ll be able to resell OpenZone vouchers to visitors and make a few quid, as well as sharing their bandwidth with all and sundry.

“Free BT public wi-fi hotspot for every business broadband customer” claims the release, proudly suggesting that “Hub owners buy BT Openzone access vouchers … and can choose to pass the vouchers to their customers or resell the prime business service and add revenue”, so you can either screw visitors to your office by selling them vouchers, or pay BT twice for the same bandwidth by giving them away.

BT claims the OpenZone users are securely separated from local users, and has the experience of Fon to back that up. But hitting customers twice for the same bandwidth is certainly a new low for the former-monopoly telco.

BT does offer instructions for turning off the hotspot, and the company isn’t expecting customers to share their bandwidth for nothing. Assuming you don’t disable the hotspot then you get entered into a prize draw and could be the lucky owner of an iPod Touch (8GB), or even a few hours of free OpenZone access – which might be useful if you’re visiting a company that wants to sell you access.

BT FTTC could see VDSL2 in the UK

GI Webmaster — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:11:28 +0000

Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) could bring next generation access speeds to many parts of the UK. Most proposals to date have talked about using VDSL, but the latest product descriptions appear to be backing VDSL2.

VDSL2 is already used in countries like Belgium, Denmark and Finland, and while it has a maximum speed of 250Mbps, this drops to 100Mbps on a 0.5km telephone line, and 50Mbps at 1km. These high speeds on short runs of copper telephone line are what make a cabinet based deployment of VDSL2 attractive.

BT Openreach in 2008 suggested three main configurations for the product:

20Mbps downstream, 5Mbps upstream
30Mbps downstream, 10Mbps upstream
40Mbps downstream, 15Mbps upstream

These three configurations are not fixed speed, i.e. they represent rate adaptive products, so people who are burdened with an unusually long run of cable from the home to the nearest street cabinet may see lower speeds.

The much more symmetric nature that is proposed will please gamers and those remotely accessing hardware in their home, e.g. Slingbox devices streaming their TV. Lets hope that speeds like this do come to fruition and that the UK can catch up with other countries that started to deploy this technology in 2007 and 2008.

BT to be freed from service obligations

GI Webmaster — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:26:05 +0000

Communications minister Lord Carter is to free BT from its universal service obligations – its legal duty to run a phone line to every home in the country, as well as provide payphones and other basic services available at a reasonable cost. Instead Carter is expected to call for universal broadband access, wireless or wired, for every home to be an obligation for the industry as a whole.

BT has been asking for years to be freed from USO – the most recent reason being costs of setting up its new network, 21CN.

Carter is due to deliver his Digital Review later this month and The Times expects it to follow at least in part the French model, where operators all contribute a levy to help pay for basic services for disadvantaged or remote customers.

The Digital Review is also looking at the future of DAB radio and Channel 4’s funding.