Openreach announced that it will enhance its new Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) product speed for communications providers (CPs) from the beginning of next month.
The enhanced product will deliver downstream headline speeds of 80Mbps and upstream speeds of 20Mbps.
FTTC technology covers the majority of BT’s £2.5bn commercial roll-out of fibre broadband in the UK and currently delivers up to 40Mbps downstream and up to 10Mbps upstream.
Openreach said the doubling of the speeds is expected to deliver a significant boost to households and businesses within BT’s fibre footprint.
The company claimed the downstream speeds are nearly double those on offer currently while the upstream speeds will be the fastest that are widely available to consumers in the UK.
The communications providers can choose when they plan to offer these enhanced speeds to end users, since the current 40Mbps service will continue to be available.
BT’s fibre broadband service is available to more than seven million homes and businesses and the company is looking at delivering it to around two-thirds of UK premises by the end of 2014.
Openreach’s fibre network is available to all CPs on an open wholesale access basis, where homes and businesses in enabled areas have access to a choice of communications providers.
