BT has announced that it will be bringing G.fast broadband to the UK in 2016 or 2017, which will enable download speeds of up to 1Gbps.
The announcement comes as part of BT’s vision to turn Britain’s broadband from merely ‘superfast’ to ‘ultrafast.’
To that end, BT will test its G.fast technology in two pilot locations starting this summer. These will take place in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire and Gosforth, Newcastle, and will cover an estimated 4,000 homes and businesses.
Assuming these are successful, the UK telecoms giant will then roll out the technology to UK households in 2016 or 2017. Most households will eventually be able to get up to 500Mbps download speeds, while there’ll also be a premium service offering the full 1Gbps.
That’s more than ten times the speed of BT’s current high-end broadband offering, which sits at 76Mbps.
Initially, however, BT says that speeds will max out at “a few hundred megabits per second,” which is still a massive boost. That kind of performance should be available to millions of UK households by 2020, when it expects additional investment and improvements to push things towards that 500Mbps mark.
G.fast itself is largely built on the existing fibre broadband set-up, which is why the implementation of this major upgrade can be so swift.
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Another benefit of BT’s plans is that UK broadband coverage will be boosted to 95 percent of the country over the next few years.
The country is already ahead of other major European countries Germany, France, Italy and Spain when it comes to broadband coverage and take-up. BT says that these plans will allow the UK to join the world’s broadband elite, such as Japan and South Korea.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
