Almost 35,000 Scottish homes will gain access to super-fast broadband in the coming weeks after BT announced its fibre network has reached Irvine, Bo’ness and Ayr.
BT says its fibre footprint now passes more than 16 million UK homes and businesses and is expected to pass around 19 million – two-thirds of UK premises by the end of Spring 2014, 18 months ahead of the original timetable.
The fibre network is deployed by Openreach, BT’s local network business, and is used by both BT Retail and non-BT companies to provide super-fast broadband to residential and business customers.
The majority of connections use the fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) technology, where the fibre runs from the exchange to a local roadside cabinet and then along the traditional copper cabling to the user’s premises.
Top speeds are currently 80Mbps for downloads and 20Mbps for uploads and BT says these could be improved in future.
Brendan Dick, BT Scotland director, said: “Whatever you’re doing online, you can do it better and faster with fibre. Whether it’s shopping, downloading music and video, watching TV, social networking, studying or researching homework, once you’ve switched to fibre you’ll never look back. Outside the home, it also has huge potential for public services and city businesses”.
“Businesses working better with fibre tell us it’s helping them in a wealth of ways, from day to day activities like downloading software, collaborating with clients and moving large data files around to big business decisions like expanding the workforce or introducing better quality IT services at less cost.
“BT is not just building a national communications network fit for 21st century Britain; we’re doing it at speed, making fibre broadband available to around 80,000 more premises a week.