Zen Internet announced last week that it would be offering free upgrades to all new and existing customers with download speeds reaching 20mbps and upload speeds up to 1mbps.
The service will be available from this summer according to Zen. The company however says that its customers may not see any increase until 2010 despite the fact that they have been working on the upgrade since late 2008.
It is estimated that Zen customers will get on average, download speeds between 9mbps and 13mbps depending on how far they are from their local BT exchanges. However, some trial users have been able to achieve over 20mbps due to the fact that all BT exchanges have been upgraded to ADSL2+ which allows speeds of up to 24mbps in theory.
BT plans to increase its cover to 55 percent of business and homes by March 2010, a figure that is severely constrained by the fact that "the rate at which customers can be moved is physically restricted by the number of BT engineers working within each local exchange."
But BT told PC Pro that this was not the case and that Zen could move all of its 50,000 or so customers in a couple of months given the fact that BT is currently processing around 3,000 customers every day.
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NB. As it stands right now, Zen broadband is more expensive than BT when it comes to home and office broadband. The minimum Zen customers can expect to pay is £17.61 per month. This gives you 5GB worth of download and excludes the cost of the line rental.
