BT to test new technology to increase broadband speeds

British Telecom is looking to a new technology called G.fast to increase broadband speeds over copper to hundreds of megabits per second, and would soon conduct trials to see if it was right.

If the trials were to prove that the technology indeed delivered, it was good news for homes and businesses that did not have access to fibre in the UK - but also across Europe.

Around 4,000 English homes and businesses would be involved in BT's pilots, that aimed to find out what speeds could be delivered using G.fast at scale.

What speeds G.fast users would get to enjoy would depend on a number of factors, including the quality of the copper and the distance between the operator's network equipment and the modem.

For instance, BT last year achieved download speeds of around 700Mbps and upload speeds at 200Mbps over a distance of 66 metres in a small field trial.

BT was more conservative when it came to real-world speeds and expects to offer users a few hundred megabits per second initially.

Speeds would then rise to 500Mbps for a majority of users, with new standards being agreed on and hardware based on them developed, it said.

Meanwhile, The Register reported that BT chief executive Gavin Patterson saying during the company's latest earnings call that the firm would pilot the technology in two areas this summer, covering some 4,000 homes and businesses.

In the event the tests proved successful, BT would look to start widespread commercial deployments from 2016 and commissioning services to customers by 2020.

BT aimed to deliver download speeds of 500Mbps, however, G.fast technology could potentially offer speeds as high as 1Gbps, which BT was planning to offer as a premium service, which was over 10 times as fast as BT's current high-end broadband offering, which sat at 76Mbps.

According to Patterson, the company believed G.fast was the key to unlocking ultra-fast speeds and BT was prepared to upgrade large parts of our network should the pilot prove successful.