Fibre broadband coming to your home?

 

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Posted on 11 Nov 2008 at 11:48

Over four million British homes and businesses will plug into high-speed fibre broadband within five years, industry experts predict.

New forecasts by Point Topic suggest that optical fibre will be in use for about 20 per cent of the 22 million broadband lines that are expected to be deployed in the UK by late 2013.

The cable TV network is expected to stand up well against this challenge, holding onto 23 per cent of the broadband market, because it is already going some way towards providing much higher speeds. However, Point Topic predicts that the proportion using basic DSL, the telephone line technology which is the mainstay of today's broadband, will have dropped from over 78 per cent today to only 57 per cent.

Most of the fibre connections will actually involve fibre only as far as the local telephone concentrator, so called FTTC or fibre-to-the-cabinet. The last few hundred yards will still be on high-speed types of DSL over copper telephone lines. This will provide the majority of users with downstream data at 20 Mbps or more.

Combined with new technologies in the core network, users will be able to get much more reliable, high bandwidth, high quality services than they can enjoy today.

With the increasing political and business pressure to make a national commitment to fibre, the prospects for a major step towards high-speed next-generation access look much more realistic than they did even a few months ago, according to Tim Johnson, chief analyst at Point Topic.

"This is probably the first moment when it has been possible to make a plausible forecast for fibre in the UK, based on some real plans and activity," said Johnson.

BT has announced a provisional plan to roll-out fibre to 10 million homes by 2012. Other operators in Bournemouth, South Yorkshire, East London and other locations are also either rolling out or trialling variations on fibre services, but less than half of these homes will actually subscribe to the fibre service, predicts Johnson.

"It will probably take a bit longer than that [to reach BT's target of 10 million homes by 2012] but there are lot of other players coming into the market too," said Johnson. "So we estimate there will be over 4.4 million fibre lines by the end of 2013."

Author: Robert Jaques