Super-fast Broadband Goes Live In Fountainbridge

Super-fast broadband is now available to the first homes and businesses in the Fountainbridge area of Edinburgh, BT announced today.

More than 8000 local householders and firms in the city exchange area are poised to join the high-speed revolution as engineers complete the local upgrade in the coming weeks.

The latest development means that more than 48,000 local premises in Edinburgh are either already connected to the high-speed internet technology, or soon will be. BT has also announced plans to pass another 30,000 premises in the city with its fibre network either later this year or during 2012.

BT’s local access network business, Openreach, expects to make super-fast fibre broadband available to two-thirds of UK homes and businesses by the end of 2015*. It will use a mix of fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) and fibre to the premises (FTTP) technologies. Both are much faster than those speeds previously available to most UK homes and businesses.

FTTC, delivered to street cabinets, currently offers download speeds of up to 40Mbps and upload speeds up to 10Mbps. Openreach is planning to roughly double these speeds next year. FTTP, taking fibre all the way to homes and businesses, will offer speeds of up to 100Mbps.

Brendan Dick, BT Scotland director, said: “The arrival of super-fast broadband in Fountainbridge is a huge boost for local residents and businesses. It will transform their experience of the internet. They’re joining more than five million UK premises now passed by what we believe to be the world’s fastest growing fibre network.

“Fast and reliable internet connections are an essential part of our national infrastructure, whether we want them for entertainment at home, education online, boosting our businesses or delivering essential public services. BT’s investment in fibre broadband will benefit Edinburgh’s ability to compete and the wider local economy.

“BT has plans to bring super-fast broadband to two-thirds of the UK, but our ambitions run even deeper. We want to work closely with the public sector to reach the more challenging final third – those largely rural and remote locations where a partnership approach is needed.

“We are already bringing super-fast broadband to rural parts of Northern Ireland and Cornwall in large-scale, ambitious partnerships that could serve as blueprints for other remote and rural areas. We believe we’re well placed to help deliver sustainable, fast broadband networks in any part of the UK.”

Internet users with a super-fast connection can do much more online, all at the same time. For instance, a family could be downloading a movie, watching a TV replay service, surfing the internet and playing games online. A music track can be downloaded in about two seconds, a whole album in 30 seconds and a feature length HD movie in 10 minutes. Upload speeds are the fastest in the UK, allowing large videos and data files to be sent almost instantly and activities, such as uploading hi-resolution photos to Facebook, to be completed in seconds.

Unlike other companies, Openreach offers access to service providers on an open, wholesale basis, supporting a competitive market.