BT bumps broadband speed up

[Realist]

Except for 150 steam-driven exchanges

By Team Register
<SMALL>Published Thursday 2nd March 2006 15:53 GMT</SMALL>
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In brief:
BT says that 99.6 per cent of UK homes and businesses will be able to get higher speed broadband from the end of this month. The UK incumbent said that 78 per cent of BT customer lines should be able to support 4Mbit/s and above, while 42 per cent will get 6Mbit/s and above. Those special people who live or work very close to their exchange may get upto 8Mb/s. BT said it is upgrading 5,300 exchanges to support these speeds. Pity those poor souls hooked up to the 150 smaller exchanges who won't get the spanking new speeds.®

Taken from: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/02/bt_speed_jump/

8MB here we come .

[bonzobob999]

About bloody time.

[Realist]

Yes I cant wait

[lincsat]

Here's the story from ADSLGuide.org

BT Wholesale in conjunction with the service providers has been testing an up to 8Mbps ADSL service for what seems forever. Today sees BT Wholesale announce the product. Up till now we have referred to the products as BT Home Max and BT Office Max, BT Wholesale has now altered the names to BT ADSL Max and BT ADSL Max Premium. The 'premium' tag referring to the provision of an up to 832kbps upstream. Full BT press release is on www.btplc.com.

From 31st March 2006 the product will go live on a national basis, rather than the limited number of exchanges at present (as of 1st March, this was just 76 exchanges). The service should be available on around 5300 exchanges, which will cover around 99.6% of homes and businesses in the UK. The key component to the Max services is that they are rate adaptive (i.e. will run at the highest speed they can) in both the downstream and upstream directions, which should see the vast majority of lines running a lot faster than under the existing planning rules used by BT Wholesale.

The potential range of line speeds are 160kbps (kilo bits per second) to 8192kbps downstream, the upstream ranging from 160kbps to 448kbps on Max, and 832kbps on Max Premium. BT in its press release has provided some estimates for how many people will get various speeds, 78% of BT lines are expected to manage 4Mbps or faster, 6Mbps to around 42%. It should be pointed out that even if you get the full 8192kbps, this is actually 3.6 times faster than an existing 2Mbps line. This is because a 2Mbps line runs at 2272kbps so that with the network overheads people will see close to 2Mbps under ideal conditions, so an 8192kbps line speed will provide around 7.1 to 7.3Mbps of potential data speed.

BT Wholesale is NOT going to carry out automatic upgrades of lines, this is down to your individual service provider, and at this time BT Wholesale is warning that it may take several months to regrade all the expected lines that providers will want switched. The existing Home 250/500/1000/2000 and corresponding Office products will continue to exist, and will still have the same planning rules applied, i.e. 2Mbps only on lines with under 43dB downstream attenuation, and 60dB for 1Mbps.

Over the next few days and weeks we will endeavour to update our sites various FAQ's and where questions are repeatedly asked we will add new subjects. One misconception worth clearing up, running on an 8Mbps line is not going to make a difference to gamers during game play, the extra upstream may make things smoother if using audio/video streaming during game play, but general gaming is latency rather than bandwidth limited, and the latency will remain pretty much the same. There is one exception and it is one gamers want to avoid, and that is the interleave option, which is a more robust form of error correction on the ADSL line and at the expense of 20 to 40ms of latency, the advantage being the line will run faster and more reliably. Interleave is an option the service providers will have the ability to enable and disable.

[Realist]

As a follow on:

BT 'quadruples' broadband speeds from 31 March

BT is to increase its broadband speeds by up to four times from 31 March.

The firm said 78% of its users would be able to access at least four megabits per second (4Mbps), compared with the maximum of two available now.

Almost half would get 6Mbps and those close to their local exchange would be able to access 8Mbps.

Some rival providers already offer up to 24Mbps, but their services are restricted mainly to clusters of users in big cities.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4773880.stm
http://www.t3.co.uk/news/247/genera...adband_hits_8mb
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communicati...39255215,00.htm
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/...EkApyuyonRLQvDX
WHOOPEEEEEEEE!

check using this:
http://www.samknows.com/broadband/phoneno.php
type in your phone number, click your exchange and look at the "ADSL Max enable date"... thats the date it'l startup. mines is 31st march !!!

My exchange says 31st March

Tenative means:

Not fully worked out, concluded, or agreed on; provisional: tentative plans.
Uncertain; hesitant.

So I think they mean it is provisioned for the 31st but cant hold there breath.

We will all just have to wait and see.

Laters

[bonzobob999]

Mine is the same 31st March, Tenative. As the crow flys the exchange is about 1000 yrds away from my house...........we shall see.

[bonzobob999]

Are you getting any faster speeds yet peeps?

[netreaper]

I'll just keep waiting for B.T to get its act up and running in my area a bit more speed would be very nice..with out having to change my s.p..

[jimbr1111]

Mine's gone from 2 to 4M