BT trials "FTTP on-demand"

UK telco BT has successfully trialled the delivery of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband on an on-demand basis in St Agnes, Cornwall, delivering speeds of up to 300 Mbps.

The trials take advantage of fibre infrastructure which BT has already installed between exchanges and street cabinets, and could lead to FTTP connections being made available anywhere in the company’s fibre footprint where a customer requires it.

BT is to conduct further trials of FTTP on-demand this summer, with the aim of making it commercially available to communications providers by spring 2013. The service is expected to be particularly attractive to small and medium-sized businesses.

The telco has also confirmed that it plans to upgrade its existing Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) connections this spring, approximately doubling currently available speeds to 80 Mbps downstream and 20 Mbps upstream.

More than 7m UK homes and businesses can now access fibre broadband from BT, and this figure is set to rise to 10m in 2012, and then to around two-thirds of all UK premises by the end of 2014.

In its third-quarter 2011 results which were announced today, BT revealed that it had a healthy 56 per cent share of all new broadband market net additions in the three-month period, having signed on a further 146,000 retail broadband customers in the period, taking its retail broadband customer base to 3.1m.

Take-up of its super-fast broadband product ‘BT Infinity’ (based on Fibre-to-the-Premises and Fibre-to-the-Cabinet) remained on track with 95,000 customers added in the quarter, bringing its total to over 400,000 customers. An average of 7,300 new BT Infinity customers are currently being added each week.