BT pushes broadband up to 8Mbps
BT will now be supplying broadband at a very high speed of up to 8Mbps to millions of UK businesses and homes by this month end. As from March 31, 2007, faster broadband services will be available as announced by Telco. This 8MB broadband service is based on ADSL Max; it uses existing standards of DSL without any rate limitations. This offer provides much faster speed than any of BT’s current ADSL products which are heavily priced since this service was launched. However, now as almost all broadband users will get faster speed than before, 8Mbps will not be universally available. Only 42 percent of phone lines will support 6 Mbps or faster, while rest 78 percent will get only 4Mbps. This information is released by BT. Consumer variants upstream speed can maximum reach up to 448kbps whereas an office version can reach up to 832kbps. If you want to work on full 8Mbps of speed, then a perfect place will be somewhere near to your local telephone exchange as per BT.
Other ISP’s also wanted to offer the same ADSL Max services, but so far only a few have released their Fast Broadband plans. Like Zen Internet has quoted a price of £24.99 per month for the same speed of 8Mbps for its consumer product, and £34.99 for its business version. Zen is providing a free upgrade to customers from 2 MB broadband (2Mbps) up to 8Mbps. As per BT, they are not going the charge any of there existing customers for upgrading them from 2 Mbps to 8 Mbps, other ISP’s have also started the same upgrade process as there is not much benefit in charging customer for upgrading and raising the service price later on. Broadband service providers are not going to benefit from re-upgrading those customers who were upgraded to 2 Mbps in the past. For other customers, they have to pay £5 to get this upgrade process completed, as per a spokeswoman at BT wholesale. Other monthly charges and connection fees will remains same. UK online was offering the 8 Mbps service in the urban areas since last year and BT Broadband has taken a while before jumping up to this decision of upgrading to a better service and to accommodate as many people as possible.
