Rural customers to get business broadband says BT

The recently released digital Britain report saw the government promising to provide high-speed broadband connections of at least 2Mbps universally throughout the UK by 2012 and in order to help the government achieve this target BT are testing a new fixed-line broadband technology.

Based on technology that is already being used for business-class broadband services, the system that is to be trialled is called Broadband enabling technology. The ability to extend broadband services further than before from local exchanges is the main feature of this new service and it can be achieved with relatively fast broadband connection speeds.

The managing director of service delivery at BT Openreach, John Small said “We’re really excited about the potential of BET to extend broadband to the remaining not-spots. By rolling out BET, we can help customers and assist the government to realise its aim for a universal 2Mbps broadband service.”

The new BET system can provider two-way broadband speeds of up to 1Mbps and this can be delivered up to 12km from an exchange and compares to the distance of 5km that can be achieved with regular ADSL. The bonding together of multiple lines will be required in order to get broadband speeds of 2Mbps or anything higher than the standard 1Mbps.

Since 2001 the service has been proposed as an alternative to the current ADSL and uses an existing technology called SHDSL, which is short for Single-Pair High-speed Digital Subscriber Line.

There are plans by Openreach to roll out the technology to eight sites throughout the UK, which are Ponteland in Northumberland, Badsey in Worcestershire, Wigton in Cumbria, Llanfyllin in Powys, Leyland in Lancashire, Twyford in Berkshire, Wymondham in Norfolk and Horsham in West Sussex. Dingwall and Inverness in Scotland are already trialling the BET system for Openreach.

Source – ZDNet