BT Logo

BT began the trialling of Fibre-To-The-Cabinet (FTTC) broadband for businesses and consumers yesterday. The first two locations to be activated are Muswell Hill in London and Whitchurch in Cardiff.

FTTC can achieve end-to-end speed/throughput of up to 40 Mbps. ISPs trialling in the pilot scheme include BT retail, O2, Sky, TalkTalk, and others using BT Wholesale’s phone lines.

FTTC is where fibre is connected to a cabinet in the street and the premises in that immediate area use existing copper lines to connect to that cabinet. BT plans to have 29 exchanges FTTC-enabled by early 2010, and 40% of the UK ready for 2012. These 29 exchanges are the lucky ones to be selected to be enabled at the beginning of 2010:

• Chelmsford, Essex
• St Albans, Hertfordshire
• Watford, Hertfordshire
• Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire
• Leagrave, Bedfordshire
• Luton, Bedfordshire
• Canonbury, London
• Chingford, London
• Edmonton, London
• Enfield, London
• Highams Park, London
• Tottenham, London
• Thamesmead, London
• Woolwich, London
• Bury, Greater Manchester
• Didsbury, Greater Manchester
• Failsworth, Greater Manchester
• Heaton Moor, Greater Manchester
• Oldham, Greater Manchester
• Rusholme, Greater Manchester
• Belfast Balmoral
• Dean, Edinburgh
• Glasgow Halfway
• Glasgow Western
• Cardiff
• Taffs Well, Rhondda Cynon Taf
• Halifax, West Yorkshire
• Pudsey, West Yorkshire
• Calder Valley, West Yorkshire

Even better than FTTC is Fibre-To-The-Premises (FTTP, or Home; FTTH), which would achieve speeds of up to 100 Mbps. BT have also been trialling this technology and plan to deploy it starting March 2010, starting with 40,000 homes.

Read the ZDNet UK article.