BT Begins £1.5bn Fibre Optic Broadband Roll-out Comments

This is great news, but people who live too far away from exchanges will still have to suffer the low speed connections. It'll be interesting to see how quickly this begins to hit homes, and how the speed compares to Virgin's 20Mb and 50Mb connections.

here here I say

Take a look at the site below and you can check when your exchange is scheduled to be upgraded: http://www.samknows.com/broadband/search.php

The line you are looking for is 21CN WBC status under BT Wholesale.

An interesting web link, thanks! Reading the website though, BT's '21CN' programme was announced three years ago, so how is this development different? Is it suggesting that we'll all get FTTP (fibre to the premises)? Hope so!

It may have been 'announced' a fair while ago, but it is only now that we are seeing some concrete action. Part of the action is this announcement with the rest being exchanges being converted to allow provision. This is what the website above shows you. Incidentally, it shows 18 November 2008 as the date for my exchange so hopefully not long to go! ;)

I'm not jumping to BT's defense, but I'm glad we're seeing things moving.

Reading the samknows article about this, it looks like what it means is that new homes may get the 100mbit service but the best the rest of us will get (if we're lucky enough to be in the 1/6 of the population covered) is 40mbit.

Unfortunately no mention of upload speeds, although I can't be the only one hoping it'll be something decent this time (10mbit would do for a start).

WBC seems to be the ADSL2 24mbps service that Be already offers, are you sure that marks the fibre rollout as well?

Sorry - you are quite right. The Samknows website shows the date for the faster ADSL2 technology and not fibre optic cable which is in a limited rollout. I must stop taking what I read on other forums as being necessarily accurate! Having said that - it's a step in the right direction.