BT, a British telecom, said today it would spend an additional £1 billion ($1.49 billion) to deploy fiber to up to two-thirds of the homes it serves by 2015, up from the 40 percent that BT said late last year it would reach by 2012. The $1.49 billion boost in spending will increase its total investment in fiber to $3.72 billion.
The plan still relies on fiber to the node, as opposed to the fiber to the home, but the network is open to all service providers — a key difference from networks in the U.S. However, that hasn’t stopped BT from some bad behavior (it was accused of slowing broadband speeds during peak hours) on the network management side. Unlike Australia’s future fiber-to-the-home network, BT’s network doesn’t have government funding.
Ian Livingston, CEO of BT, said he expects 4 million homes to have access to superfast broadband, with speeds of up to 40Mbps, by the end of this year. The government goal is to have available speeds of up to 2 Mbps across the country by 2012. Suddenly our National Broadband Plan of giving 100 million homes 100 Mbps broadband by 2020 isn’t looking too terrible, especially since about 60 million homes already have access to broadband that can deliver 50 Mbps.
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