We once asked the head of BT Vision (no longer there) why BT wasn’t just piling into ADSL2+ as fast as it could, and bringing IPTV, including HD video, to every home in the UK.
Paraphrasing his answer it was someone like ‘Well we will, but only once we’ve got a payback on ADSL version one, and only when we can retrain all the support teams, and help desks and work out pricing which doesn’t kill the current generation.’
That was some 5 years ago and he doesn’t work there any more, but it is hard lesson that technology ‘ especially generation two of any technology ‘ takes longer to roll out than you could possible imagine.
There are always people that had a disappointment with generation one or for whom it was quite simply enough ‘ and that acts as a drag on generation two.
Anyway this week BT took the brakes off ADSL2+ after years of trials and said it would offer it to millions of customers. Somewhere over those years we found the real reason for BT’s reticence, it would only move once all of its rivals were offering something better and today in broadband 20 Mbps is pedestrian. The new systems will however be installed for free and use something called the BT Broadband Accelerator.
You have to install this mysteriously named BT Broadband Accelerator but what is it? Well it’s not an ADSL2+ modem, although that needs to be in place anyway.
BT explains that its research has shown that one of the main causes of slow broadband is customers’ home wiring and the BT Broadband Accelerator plate, also known as the I-Plate, isolates a redundant wire in the socket which can slow connections. BT says that even if it does not improve speed the device can help stabilise broadband lines making them more reliable.
This device is free but BT says it is worth £15 plus £1.20 postage ($25 plus $2 p&p). That’s so that it can use this ‘extra cost’ discount as a stick to get people to convert. Clever. But it still costs the price of the postage, and you have to pay that.
All of the BT Retail broadband customers which currently get speeds of 8Mbps should be the same customers close enough to get 20Mbps once the new DSLAM chips are installed. Upload speeds will also increase from up to 448Kbps to up to 1Mb.
Of course BT will have to install a number of DSLAM line cards with the right chips, but about four years ago chips began to arrival which could operate with ADSL, ADSL2+ and VDSL2 and distinguish between them, so most of the BT exchanges will have had this capability for a while.
Faster speeds are already available through 549 exchanges serving 10 million homes, about 40% of the UK, and this will increase to 55% by March 2010.
BT makes a big thing out of pointing out that unlike other broadband providers, it is offering the faster speeds at no extra cost and goes on to remind us that its cheapest broadband option is just £7.78 a month for the first three months. Of course this price comes with a data cap which you will now reach so much faster with the new ADSL2+ speeds.
Like all broadband options it is a self install, which they say takes only a few minutes, so expect 25 calls to the support centre and about 2 days to get it to work. BT has the largest market share of broadband in the UK at around 35%