UK's largest consumer broadband company, talktalk, is set to start speed tests in Muswell Hill in London and Whitchurh in Cardiff to deliver download speeds of up to 40mbps using fibre-optic technology.
Both areas have been used by Openreach, a division of BT, to trial of Fibre-to-the-cabinet in October last year and should allow up to 30,000 households to reach up to 40mbps over the next few months.
Upload speeds of up to 2mbps can be expected and the trial will apparently run until the beginning of 2010 at which time, Talktalk may decide to expand the offer to its entire user base. Interestingly, upload speeds could well be increased to 5mbps with the possibility of upping it to 10mbps or even 15mbps according to ISP review. This would surpass what Virgin Media is achieving with its 50mbps line.
Talktalk users who participated in the trial got a new router and a new modem and had their 40GB monthly limit abolished. They were also given free Essentials phone and broadband package free for the duration of the trial.
Up to 1.5 million households could get access to Openreach hybrid broadband technology over the next year. BT is already starting to sell up to 20mbps broadband nationwide, which means that they are pretty confident that they deliver such performance to the masses.
Source:-
ITProPortal.
Their comments:-
Talktalk is going from strength to strength. After the acquisition of AOL broadband and Tiscali, it now stands as the biggest consumer broadband provider. Not bad for a company that didn't even existed a decade ago and now has nearly three million broadband customers.