BT installs first fibre-to-the-home

BT is to install its first-ever fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) links at a huge new estate to built at Ebbsfleet Valley in Kent promising speeds of up to 100Mbit/sec.

Almost all residential links in Britain terminate in copper cable – even those from cable companies that were founded to exploit fibre. These run copper coax cable from neighbourhood boxes to homes, which was cheaper and more than adequate for their original purpose of delivering analogue TV.

Copper lines have become a bottleneck in the interactive age when the demand for bandwidth has soared. PCW has repeated bemoaned the fact that little government effort has been put into ensuring that new houses have future-proof links.

BT and Intel stood together at one Ideal Home exhibition to urge builders to use Wifi instead of wire of copper links, claiming outrageously that this would be all the future proofing needed.

Now BT is to run fibre to 10,000 new homes at Ebbsfleet Valley, as well as to business premises. They will have the fastest speed of any homes in Britain.

Ironically cities in developing countries are getting faster links than Britain because their communications infrastructure is being built from scratch.

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