Dave Bailey, Computing, Thursday 9 July 2009 at 06:15:00

A new era in communications began on Monday as BT went live with the first two operational trials deploying superfast fibre-optic broadband connectivity

Muswell Hill in north London and the Cardiff suburb of Whitchurch are the sites chosen for the fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) trials, involving more than 15,000 premises with more than 100 street cabinets being fibre-enabled.

BT has already announced the next 29 exchanges to be set up, which will go live by January 2010. BT strategy and portfolio group director Olivia Garfield said the company will also be announcing this week the next tranche of exchanges to be enabled.

“By 2012 we will have spent £1.5bn to bring fibre to 10 million homes,” she said.

The rollout of fibre-based broadband is a key goal of the government’s Digital Britain strategy, with a proposed levy of 50p per month on household phone lines set to help fund connectivity to parts of the country that will fall outside the reach of commercial networks from the likes of BT and Virgin Media.

One of the key technical features of fibre-optic access is that new broadband services will benefit from significantly increased upload speeds, which industry experts say will allow businesses to engage customers on a new level.

Conventional copper-based ADSL broadband has a high download speed, but is more limited in upload bandwidth (see below).

David Campbell, managing director for next-generation access at BT’s local network arm Openreach, said the FTTC trial is not just about download speeds.

“Communications providers will bundle packages of applications in the trial, and companies involved will include BT Wholesale, Carphone Warehouse, Sky and O2,” he said.

“One of the things we are most excited about is upstream [capacity] ­ it is a unique selling point for this service.”

Garfield said there will be important benefits for businesses as well as home broadband users.

“[There is] the networked office ­ we are moving towards more collaborative ways of working. What we are seeing in recessionary times across our portfolio is lots of conferencing and agile working ­ and fibre plays well [to those applications],” she said.

BT is also touting hosted and site-based voice over IP (VoIP), multi-party video calling and high-definition videoconferencing as business drivers for high-speed broadband adoption. In the public sector, applications such as tele-healthcare become more attractive.

“Upload-heavy applications such as videoconferencing, VoIP and trunking mobile calls over IP would benefit, since the upload capacity needed all adds up,” said Rob Bamforth, principal communications analyst at Quocirca.

“Increased upstream capability of fibre will make things such as remote backup, resilience and other ‘push up’ cloud-based services less constrained.”

Emerging online applications such as software-as-a-service and cloud computing could see an upsurge in deployment, as the higher bandwidth means they are able to deliver greater benefits for companies.

Broadband Stakeholder Group chief executive Antony Walker said there is an opportunity for UK businesses as the optical rollout proceeds.

“You are creating a new platform for innovation and all businesses will be able to do things differently, which will change their relationship with customers and open up new services and markets,” he said.

Walker said there are prospective productivity benefits, but firms need to have the capacity to innovate and handle the change.

“We tend to see that this stuff helps good companies become better companies,” said Walker.

“But there will be losers, because firms that fail to use the potential opportunities for innovation will struggle against their competitors.”

The same principle applies internationally ­ if the UK’s global competitors deliver better on the potential for service innovation through early access to optical-based applications, the UK could be seriously disadvantaged.

Satisfying the need for speed

The product BT’s Openreach arm is making available to ISPs is called Generic Ethernet Access over Fibre to the Cabinet (GEA-FTTC).

The technology initially offers performance of up to 40Mbit/s download and a standard upload speed of 2Mbit/s, with an optional upload speed of 5Mbit/s.

BT strategy and portfolio group director Olivia Garfield said upstream speeds, would adjusted by Openreach as service rollout proceeds in the next six to 12 months.

Pricing for the trial will not be announced until the end of July. Garfield said that although there will be special offers around the trials in north London and Cardiff, “longer term, it will depend on market take-up, usage levels and what backhaul consumption we see,” she said.

The most recent figures from broadband research firm Point Topic show that conventional DSL broadband technology is continuing to lose market share to other technologies, with fibre being the only access technology growing from quarter to quarter.

Full published article at: http://feeds.computing.co.uk/c/554/f/10979/s/5334824/l/0L0Scomputing0O0Ccomputing0Canalysis0C224570A30Cbt0Efibre0Etrials0Eherald0Eera0E4746968/story01.htm

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