Zen’s Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) fibre-optic broadband is already bringing superfast “up to 40Mbps” broadband to many of its customers across over 400 exchanges throughout the UK, with this coverage increasing to more than 600 exchanges by the end of this year. A number of Zen customers are now trialling Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) services, an exciting development delivering even faster download speeds of “up to 100Mbps” by connecting fibre-optic directly into home or office premises.
Zen Internet is one of a select few ISPs chosen by BT to run early trials of the service. The FTTP trials are scheduled to run until the end of Summer 2011. Bradwell Abbey (Milton Keynes) and Highams Park (North London) are already underway with Leytonstone, York and Chester South planned for April and May.
BT has updated its Fibre broadband roll-out schedule to include more than 50 exchanges that will get access to a mix of FTTP and FTTC Fibre broadband during 2012. Many of these exchanges will serve the 21 new Enterprise Zones announced by the Government in the recent Budget, including the city centre areas of Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester.
“Anything that encourages new business and allows further access to superfast broadband is very good news. We see superfast Fibre broadband as the key enabling technology for a whole range of business internet services such as e-commerce, Cloud Computing, video-conferencing, VoIP and remote working in order to make UK business more productive while minimising costs. I personally saw a ten-fold increase in download performance when my home office moved over to FTTC,” said Andrew Saunders, Head of Product Management and Marketing.
“The benefits of Fibre broadband to businesses are clear and today Zen can already provide Fibre broadband to many more businesses and homes than you may expect. This situation will only improve with the introduction of FTTP services and the planned Fibre roll-out programme,” added Saunders.
FTTP will enable download speeds of “up to 100Mbps” and upload speeds of “up to 30Mbps”. These speeds will offer many benefits to residential and business customers with many users being able to utilise a range of high bandwidth applications from a single internet connection. Additional bandwidth will improve the performance of Virtual Private Networks making the transfer of files more efficient and making working from home a more viable option.
VoIP and video-conferencing performance will improve with higher download and upload speeds and the technology will be able to cope with rapid growth in high definition video streaming.