BT have announced that next spring they will be upping the download speeds on their fibre-to-the-home/premises (FTTH/P) broadband products to 300Mbps, a speed boost that will put them well out in front with the fastest broadband offering. BT will also make changes to their fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) broadband services by doubling the downstream speeds up to 80Mbps. This FTTC boost had been talked about previously and both announcements will be welcome news for those who are looking for cutting edge broadband speeds.
Rollout of FTTH is only expected to reach around 25% of the country, whilst 2/3rds should be covered by 2015 by what BT call 'fibre broadband' which includes fibre-to-the-home and fibre-to-the-cabinet products. Currently only 6 exchange areas have been announced for the commercial 'early deployment' launch of FTTH at the end of this month, so BT are obviously keen to show the potential that this product holds in the future. It should be remembered that speeds on the FTTC product are still limited by the distance from your property to the cabinet in the road. For many, this is quite short so high speeds will be seen, but they may not be right up there at the 80meg limit.
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4809-bt-announce-300meg-speeds-for-ftth-in-the-spring.html
Finally we have some good news for a change! It will be wholesaled as well so there will be some decent healthy competition. I for one welcome gigabit uncapped low latency FTTH!