First customer using BT fibre-to-the-home broadband gets 77Mbps

An incredible 77Mbps download speed has been achieved by the first customer to trial the new 100Mbps fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) from BT broadband that has just recently gone live.

Rather than using the current copper wire phone network the new BT trial runs fibre optic cabling directly to businesses and homes and is being offered on a wholesale basis to all DSL broadband providers so the customer set up with the first trial connection was actually a Plusnet Broadband user.

As well as hitting download speeds of a huge 77Mbps the user also achieved upload speeds of 15Mbps, although download speeds of 30Mbps and uploads of 6Mbps were reached by most of the 65 users that were on the trials according to Plusnet.

A spokesman for Plusnet advised “FTTP offers speeds of up to 100Mb down and currently up to 15Mb up (the upstream will be increased later in the trial). Unlike existing DSL broadband services there’s no copper involved in the connection. An engineer will run fibre optic cable direct to your home. As such, certain limitations on copper such as the speed decreasing the further you are from the exchange are no longer an issue.”

He went on to add “Is 100Mb overkill? What will people find to do with 100Mb? It’s hard to say, from an application point of view what services will make best use of speeds that high? File downloads will benefit of course and the faster upload will really help people that send large files or host services. Our first thoughts on the faster downloads will be the benefits it gives to people with slower speeds. For those with speeds under 2Mb-3Mb on DSL the difference will be huge. Where in the past they may have struggled to watch online video for example, they can now watch iPlayer HD with ease and also download files at the same time and have someone else in the household play games or watch another HD stream at the same time.”