BT kick-starts ADSL trials in London

BT has launched its first trials of high speed ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) technology in London. Consumers and small businesses in the north and west of the city will be able to hook up to the Internet at speeds of up to 2Mbps with Interactive Services Network (INS) trial. The technology also allows simultaneous use of normal phone lines.

The trials will run until the end of March 1999, at which point BT will announce its future plans for the technology.

Last month, the UK telco launched BT Highway, which offers Internet connection over ISDN lines, however ADSL is significantly faster. Download speeds can be over fifteen times faster while upload speeds are double ISDN's maximum of 128kbps.

Simon Brookes, IP network services manager at BT, said: "ADSL has a higher bandwidth, but it is not symmetric. The best application for the corporate would be for remote access to the corporate LAN from the home, videoconferencing or to download information between distributed sites." He added: "ISDN is symmetric and is here now."

Gavin Parnaby, analyst at Datamonitor, said: "The growth of the Internet means people need more bandwidth and in a couple of years ADSL will be widely available, but ISDN is the stepping stone."

Parnaby added: "ADSL will mainly be taken up by consumers, small businesses and SoHo's (small office, home office). Big corporates would go for fibre optic cable or HDSL which can provide symmetric high speed voice and data transfer."

Meanwhile Kingston Communications - which operates a local loop network around Hull in the UK - has been trialling ADSL in Hessle for 18 months. Last month it completed its network upgrade for ADSL and is expected to launch commercial products around March 1999.