BT to roll out fibre to 1.2 million more homes

Telecoms provider BT has announced its intention to provide fibre optic broadband access to a further 1.2 million homes in the UK by the end of 2013. This will be achieved by upgrading another 99 exchanges in new areas, bringing 600,000 households online with the new tech, as well as “infill” in existing areas, expanding the applicable radius, thereby incorporating another 600,000 homes.

This extra million and a bit people will bring the total of fibre applicable homes to 14 million and the total number of upgraded exchanges to 1,700. Most of the new additions will be in the North East and West of England, with some extra upgrades taking place in Scotland.

Mike Galvin, Managing Director, NGA, Openreach, said: “The UK is making great progress with super-fast broadband and this latest phase of work will keep up the momentum. Speeds are increasing all the time with the UK second only to Japan within the G8. I am sure that communities across the UK will be pleased to see that they are factored into our commercial plans and I now look forward to working with councils to identify further areas that we can enable with their support.”

BT also published a full list of the upgraded exchanges on its website, so if you're been waiting for some time to get high speed fibre broadband and you're in one of the aforementioned regions, you may be in luck.

KitGuru Says: Man, where I live we just got upgraded to 21CN so can now get about 14Mb conections. Not bad I suppose, but my brother 10 miles away has 120Mb with Virgin. Git.

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