BT Openreach has formally debuted its set of Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) whole services, enabling competitive providers to higher speed fiber-based broadband services to their respective customer bases.
Offering a suite of speeds ranging from 40/2 Mbps to 330/30 Mbps, BT said this new set of wholesale products will “allow Communications Providers (CPs) to differentiate themselves in the market by offering a wide range of fibre products to suit the needs of small and medium businesses as well as bandwidth-hungry consumers.”
Until now, the FTTP services had been offered to competitive providers such as BskyB and TalkTalk on what it calls an “early market deployment” basis. Now, the new service will initially be available within the 15 exchange areas where BT has built out FTTP network infrastructure.
Beginning next spring, BT will make FTTP available “on demand” in areas that are already being served by its Fiber to the Cabinet (FTTC) network.
The service provider continues to make progress with its overall aggressive Fiber to the X (FTTX) roll out. To date, it has passed 10 million premises with an aggressive goal to pass about two-thirds of UK premises by 2014.
Mike Galvin, Openreach MD for Network Investment, said that while FTTC is a sound near-term method to provide higher bandwidth speeds over an existing hybrid copper/fiber network – some of the fastest in the world – and build propositions which help to grow the market for these higher-speed services.”