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Super-speed broadband heads to Kent
How would you use yours?

By Natasha Lomas

Published: Thursday 10 January 2008

BT has given details of a planned fibre deployment in the Thames Gateway regeneration region - its first use of fibre to hook up homes in the UK.

Instead of laying traditional copper cabling to the buildings planned for the 1,000 acre development area in Ebbsfleet Valley, Kent, the telco will put in fibre cabling which can support data speeds of up to 100Mbps - aka very fat pipes indeed.

Around 10,000 homes will be built at the Ebbsfleet Valley development, along with six million square feet of commercial space and three million square feet of retail, leisure and community facilities.

BT Openreach, the telco's local access network business, said the fibre will be available from August and access will be offered on a wholesale basis to all UK communication providers.

Steve Robertson, chief executive of Openreach, said the fibre deployment will enable comms providers to gauge how much demand there is for "very high speed broadband" - and develop business models accordingly.

BT said it would like to make greater use of fibre for hooking up suitable new build sites - but said this investment depends upon an agreement with Ofcom which is currently consulting about the best regulatory framework for future fibre deployment.

The average fat pipe speed in the UK is just 3.6Mbps, according to price comparison website uSwitch - which means Blighty lags behind near neighbour France, where it says average speeds are 17.6Mbps.

Asia Pacific, including countries such as South Korea where fibre deployments are more widespread, offers broadband services with the highest average speeds in the world, according to analyst Point Topic.