Super-fast broadband is now available to the first homes and businesses in new parts of the capital, BT has announced.
More than 400,000 local householders and firms in 30 new exchange areas*, including Clerkenwell, Primrose Hill, South Clapham and Northolt are poised to join the high-speed revolution as engineers complete the local upgrade in the coming weeks.
The latest development means that around 1.8 million local premises in London are either already connected to the high-speed internet technology, or soon will be. BT has announced plans to pass another 700,000 premises in the capital with its fibre network either later this year or during 2012.
BT’s local access network business, Openreach, expects to make super-fast fibre broadband available to two-thirds of UK homes and businesses by the end of 2015*. It will use a mix of fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) and fibre to the premises (FTTP) technologies. Both are much faster than those speeds previously available to most UK homes and businesses.
FTTC, delivered to street cabinets, currently offers download speeds of up to 40Mbps and upload speeds up to 10Mbps. Openreach is planning to roughly double these speeds next year. FTTP, taking fibre all the way to homes and businesses, will offer speeds of up to 100Mbps.
Duncan Ingram, regional director for BT in London, said: “The arrival of super-fast broadband in these additional areas is a huge boost for local homes and businesses. It will transform their experience of the internet. They’re joining the more than five million UK premises now passed by what we believe to be the world’s fastest growing fibre network.
“Fast and reliable internet connections are an essential part of our national infrastructure, whether we want them for entertainment at home, education online, boosting our businesses or delivering essential public services. BT’s investment in fibre broadband will benefit London’s ability to compete and the wider local economy.”
Internet users with a super-fast connection can do much more online, all at the same time. For instance, a family could be downloading a movie, watching a TV replay service, surfing the internet and playing games online. A music track can be downloaded in about two seconds, a whole album in 30 seconds and a feature length HD movie in 10 minutes. Upload speeds are the fastest in the UK, allowing large videos and data files to be sent almost instantly and activities, such as uploading hi-resolution photos to Facebook, to be completed in seconds.