FIBRE BROADBAND ROLLOUT GATHERS PACE IN LINCOLNSHIRE AS NEW BT TECHNOLOGY PROMISES EVEN FASTER SPEEDS IN THE FUTURE
It’s hard to believe more than two years has passed since the very first digital conference organised by onlincolnshire.
Back then, in 2013, I told a packed conference room in Lincoln that the most important aim was to ensure as many people as possible can benefit from fibre broadband.
There is no doubt we’re well on the way to achieving that, but let’s be clear, the story is far from over. Plenty more work in towns and villages across the county is already underway or being planned for the future.
It’s worth pausing for a second to take in the remarkable achievements that BT’s partnership with Lincolnshire County Council has already delivered.
Since that event back in March 2013, fibre broadband has been made available to more than 190,000 homes and businesses across Lincolnshire, thanks to Onlincolnshire and BT’s commercial rollout. Incredible, when you think that’s more than 6,000 properties every month able to sign up to fibre broadband for the first time.
We are transforming lives, changing the way Lincolnshire as a county does business, and opening up a whole world of possibility for our younger generations.
But we know there’s more to do. Some of our smaller communities are still waiting. Often, they’re the ones it’s proving hardest to connect to the network.
We continue to work closely with the council to explore the best way of tackling the most hard-to-reach areas. And just recently, BT itself announced a commitment to ‘never say no’ to communities outside of any current rollout plans and to work with them to find a fibre solution.
BT is more determined than ever. We’re making huge advances in the development of new technology. Just last month, 2,000 homes and businesses taking part in a real-life trial in Cambridgeshire became the first in the UK to experience a new type of ultrafast broadband.
G.Fast, pioneered by BT, is already delivering ultrafast broadband speeds of up to 330 megabits per second (Mbps), more than ten times the UK average, but is capable of going even further, up to 500 Mbps.
This trial is being delivered by Openreach, BT’s local network business, on behalf of and in collaboration with UK communications providers – eight of which have chosen to take part in this early research.
If the trials, also taking place in parts of Newcastle and Swansea, are successful, and assuming UK regulation continues to encourage investment, Openreach aims to start deploying G.Fast in 2016/17. This exciting technology is without doubt the key to making ultrafast speeds more widely available.
But how does it work?
G.Fast is a type of transmission system that uses a wider frequency band to deliver high broadband speeds over short-to-medium copper lines.
BT has pioneered research into G.Fast since 2007 and we believe speeds of up to 330Mbps will be available to millions of homes by 2020, and 500Mbps available to most of the UK within just a decade.
It’s a six to nine month trial, allowing BT, Openreach and the eight communications providers taking part to assess the technical performance of the technology across a large footprint.
Different methods of deployment are being used to provide a valuable insight into how the technology can be used on a day-to-day basis, and how usage may grow over time.
The speeds on offer will allow people to stream live ultra-high-definition 4K video content to multiple devices at once, all whilst simultaneously browsing the web, uploading videos and photos, or playing online games.
So the future’s exciting. And here at BT, we’re delighted to be leading the way in transforming the UK broadband landscape from superfast to ultrafast.
It’s going to be some journey.
Bill Murphy is Managing Director of next-generation access at BT and is responsible for their nationwide superfast broadband roll-out.
Other posts in Lincolnshire broadband week:
Philip Little of Bluecube Move to the cloud accelerated by superfast broadband http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/12/cloud-services-in-lincolnshire/
Intro to day 4 by Tref http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/12/today-on-trefor-net-how-people-are-using-their-new-superfast-broadband-connection/
Broadband for all by Tref http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/11/broadband-for-all-our-rights-to-access-utilities/
Could we have a B4RN in Lincolnshire (B4RL) http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/11/broadband-for-all-our-rights-to-access-utilities/
Gigaclear Ultrafast broadband in Lincolnshire by CEO Matthew Hare http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/10/gigaclear-ultrafast-broadband-in-lincolnshire/
BT fibrebroadband Managing Director Bill Murphy discusses superfast broadband progress in Lincolnshire http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/09/bt-superfast-broadband-lincolnshire/
Lincolnshire broadband programme update by Steve Brookes http://www.trefor.net/2015/11/09/lincolnshire-broadband-programme-update/
2 replies on “BT superfast broadband supremo Bill Murphy talks about progress to date in Lincolnshire and offers a glimpse into the future”
Its a superfarce. It isn’t fibre broadband if it comes down a phone line. And Gfarce will only benefit a few, but many will be classed as ‘passed’ which is classic snake oil salesman hype.
Wake up digital britain, before it is too late. Lets have some real fibre, moral and optic, and stop throwing taxpayers money at a monopoly fighting to protect its copper assets for another decade.
A short term boost to copper speeds won’t take us into the future when we’ll need gigs to compete with the countries laying fibre now. Real fibre to the home, not this FTTC rubbish.
Neither you or I have any idea how BT plan to deploy G.fast. Given you’ve posted that most aren’t benefiting from VDSL it seems reasonable to be a little cynical of the claim regarding G.fast.
The definition of premises passed is a well established telecoms term. It’s nothing to do with ‘classic snake oil salesman hype’. Were BT or anyone else to use this term in a misleading way they could be sued by shareholders.
How urgently we’ll need FTTP is debatable. G.fast should bring fibre much closer to many homes, allowing that last step to be taken at a far lower cost though. That’s the part that seems to constantly be ignored. G.fast will deliver fibre a matter of tens of metres from premises. Obviously fibre equipment manufacturers will tell us it’s an urgent requirement, telcos will be indifferent, and Joe Public won’t care as long as the cat videos load quickly.
Depending on pricing FoD 2 may well deliver affordable gigabit services for those who wish to pay.
It’s great that you are so enthusiastic about FTTP but who is going to fund it? Some of us can’t simply speak to the people who own the land to get a free wayleave and dig through almost nothing but verges and soft land ourselves, we have public pavements and roads as the only route so streetworks have to be done professionally, and professionals like to get paid, they aren’t going to volunteer. Short of doing share issues, diluting existing shareholders’ stakes, commercial companies can’t issue shares in the projects.
I know how much it’s going to cost Virgin Media, per premises passed, to cover my own estate. The differences between them and BT are:
1) BT already have a revenue stream coming from us, so could only include incremental revenue from an FTTP deployment in the business case.
2) BT are required to wholesale, so cannot count on fully vertically integrated product revenues, just the wholesale pricing.
These both make a massive difference.
We appear to be far superior to many of our peer nations on many metrics. You may note that KPN in the Netherlands started an FTTP-heavy NGA build then rolled it back when it became clear it was costing too much and selling too little.
Perhaps your ire would be better focused on Virgin Media, and questioning why they are building HFC networks in their new builds rather than pure fibre ones.
Openreach do tend towards FTTP where developers agree now. I appreciate it doesn’t count as it’s PON and only point to point fibre will apparently do, so Google, Verizon, etc, can go into the list of people who don’t have real fibre deployed, but they have no issues deploying it for new build.
Just trying to add some balance to the buzzwords.