More than 10 of BT Wholesale’s customers are taking part in a Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) pilot that starts this month in Muswell Hill, North London and Whitchurch, Cardiff.
Running for six months, the initiative is testing the delivery of high-speed fibre services into thousands of homes and businesses, reaching speeds of up to 40Mbit/s with improved upstream speeds to 5Mbit/s. From early in 2010 BT plans to start rolling out FTTC services across the UK, initially putting them within reach of one million end-users. Expansion to 10 million is planned by 2012.
This latest trial builds on the Fibre-to-the-Premise activity underway since last September at Ebbsfleet Valley in North Kent. Here a new-build community is providing an ideal testing ground for supplying burstable broadband speeds of up to 100Mbit/s. It’s also giving Communications Providers a real-life opportunity to gauge what the likely uptake might be for services of this kind.
Today’s rocketing demand for online content indicates that it could be huge. So big, in fact, that the nation’s going to have to get to grips with a new word: ‘Petabyte’ or PB. It stands for one quadrillion bytes. Multiply that by seven and you have the volume of video transfers that BBC iPlayer is already delivering to viewers every month. Multiply it by 20 and that’s the amount of data that Google is currently processing every day.
And the growing popularity of VoIP, online HD TV and HD gaming is also boosting online traffic in a big way. So too will the super-rich, bandwidth-hungry apps that tomorrow’s world may bring: everything from HD video-calling, 3D and even 360 degree TV to Doctor@Home services and virtual academies.
The London and Cardiff FTTC trial is scheduled to end early next year and The Loop looks forward to bringing you news of the results then.
Experience the speed differences that fibre links could offer you and your customers here.
Hear about the FTTC pilot by joining our 21CN update webcall on 27 July 2009. Read more here.
Want to get primed for fibre? Find out about Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) here. This is the 21CN broadband solution that’s available to you right now and that will also be offering a fibre option in due course. There’s a fully managed version too: Wholesale Broadband Managed Connect.
