Is BT's super-fast broadband coming to your neighbourhood?

BT has revealed the towns and cities which will get high-speed fibre broadband in the second stage of its £1.5bn rollout.

The rollout of fibre - whose high speeds are expected to enable a new range of online business and consumer services - is widely regarded as the next major battle between broadband providers. BT's current rollout pits it against Virgin Media, which covers 50 per cent of the country with its own fibre deployment, for future dominance of the UK's broadband market.

Almost 70 exchanges have been named to receive fibre broadband, using a mixture of fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) and fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC).

The more expensive option, FTTP, could theoretically bring downstream speeds of up to 100Mbps and upstream speeds of 40Mbps. The less costly FTTC could deliver downstream speeds of up to 40Mbps and an uplink of between 5Mbps and 10Mbps.

Earlier this year BT named the first set of 29 exchanges destined to be upgraded to fibre, covering some 500,000 homes and businesses.

Today's announcement of a further 69 exchanges will put faster broadband within the reach of an additional 1.5 million homes, set to be fibre-enabled by summer next year.

The telco has already fibre-enabled the north London suburb of Muswell Hill and the Cardiff suburb of Whitchurch, it announced this week.

The fibre deployment is part of BT's plan to eventually cover 40 per cent of the UK population with fibre access by 2012.

However, the government believes a significant proportion of the UK will remain outside fibre coverage without intervention. To that end, as part of the Digital Britain report released last month, the government is proposing a 50p-per-month levy on all broadband lines in order to fund next-generation deployments to areas that would otherwise remain unserved by the market.

BT recently cast doubt on the ability of the 50p tax to bring fibre to 100 per cent of the population, saying it expects to see a fifth of the population without high-speed services.

To find out if your nearest exchange is set to be upgraded, click here for a list of the 69 locations named by BT today