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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.

Belkin Gigabit Powerline HD Starter Kit

Yesterday morning Belkin published a press release detailing a new product that allows consumers to transform their home electrical power lines into an Internet network. Similar products already exist on the market, but currently they can only achieve up to 200 Mbps speeds. The “Gigabit Powerline HD Starter Kit” is the first product on the market that allows speeds up to 1000 Mbps.

The Gigabit Powerline HD Starter Kit has been made available in the US for $149.99, and will be available in Europe from the beginning of August 2009, with local pricing yet to be confirmed.

The way the product works is by connecting a “modem” to the power outlet which transmits your internet connection to your power lines. An adaptor is then plugged into the end location where you wish to use the internet connection. A sample setup would be to have the main modem where the internet line comes into the property and then to have an adaptor downstairs to connect devices such as a PS3 or Xbox 360. This product allows the use of a “wired” connection instead of wireless, which will improve network speed and reduce latency.

Read the official press release. Please be advised that your internet connection (broadband) will be a limiting factor to the maximum download speed from the internet.