Recently Virgin had launched 100Mbps broadband, however the service is likely to be soon eclipsed by BT's latest venture of 1Gbps 
broadband. BT's new trial is expected to supplement the government's plan to set up Europe's best broadband plan in the UK. The trial will cover 40 market towns and its first launch is likely to be made in the town of Kesgrave in Suffolk. So, the residents of Kesgrave can expect to cruise the internet at the speed of 1Gbps sometime early next year.
BT has used fibre-to-the -home technology for this purpose, in contrast to its earlier practice of using fibre-to- the-cabinet technology, which generally leads to slower speed internet. On Monday, the government is expected to provide details about its plans for aiding broadband expansion in the country. The government is also expected to set up a £830 million for the companies which are willing to set up broadband connections in the rural areas.
In a recent survery, UK has been placed at disappointing 24th in terms of internet bang for buck. So, if you are the resident of one of the 40 towns to be covered by this plan, then do let us know about your expectations.
Edit: Gb changed to Gbps to avoid confusion between quantity of data and speed.
16 thoughts on “BT May Launch 1Gbps Broadband”
Shouldn’t BT be focusing on customers in the many areas of the country that have broadband speeds of less that 2Mbps?
Great So I can reach my 10gb download limit in 10 seconds!!!!
REMOVE the stupid download caps, instead of making it faster.
Most laptops hard drive can not transfer faster than 400mb to 800mb in best conditions. Most of people using wirelees G wich is limited to 56mb (1/20 of BT’s to be fastest internet broadband). Trust me we have bigger problem than speed. I WANT AN INTERNET WITH 50MB DOWNLOAD SPEED THAT HAS NO DOWNLOAD LIMIT,NEVER GOES DOWN,SO I DON’T HAVE TO WAST MY TIME WAITING FOR BT CUSTOMER SERVICE TO ANSWER MY CALLS!!!
Your headline suggests that BT may launch 1 Gigabyte (1GB)Broadband however other sources report that it is a 1 Gigabit (1Gb) connection. Could you please inform your readers which correct connection speed as the difference between 1GB and 1Gb is quite substantial.
You might want to revise this article, BT are trialling 1Gb (Gigabit), not 1GB (Gigabyte). :)
Considering this is a tech site you’d think you’d know the difference between “1GB” and “1Gb”. The speed will be approx 125MB/sec max, not 1024MB/sec. Still blindingly fast, mind, but come on “bit” and “Byte” are fundamentals!
100mb then 1gb, don’t make me laugh the national average is only
2.5mb.
You do the math or think of a number (it can also be imaginary )
Bringing broadband to Rural England is been on the books for BT and other for years, some have won, some have failed.
However can the public afford such things as 1GB broadband in the current economic climate. With record winter tempatures being recorded across rural parts of the UK, I would have thought people are more interested in keeping warm than on-line.
Also don’t forget all this talk of 1GB service is fine if your area can support it. I live 2.9miles from my exchange and BT have no interest in offering more than 2mb due to cost and I don’t expect to see anythng faster for sometime.
Virgin Media took the chance years ago to lay fibre optic cable on mass in our area and I now run on 50mb with 100mb around the corner without a problem.
I watch with Interest the On-Line battle between the ISP’s
It will be 1 Gb (Gigabit) broadband, not 1 GB (Gigabyte) broadband.
I don’t really understand. What’s the point of 1Gb Broadband? I run on 10 Mb, and it’s absolutely fine. Is it all about future download traffic? I would appreciate being educated on this one…..
Please forgive me, but I do2n’t get it.
Why doesn’t BT talkj about launching a 1GB Broiadband service AFTER they run a pilot tsst to ensure a successful implementation?
Its Gigabit broadband they’re talking about, not Gigabyte. That’s Gb, not GB.
Thanks
sooner the better
Well, as a freelance network engineer, I work with VM’s network, and BT’s Core networks too. Amongst others.
Also, with a brother working for VM, I’m aware of the successful 100Mb/s trails also. As a previous 50Mb/s customer, I think this will be too fast for most websites. (know of many companies with 100Mb/s upload available to YOU PERSONALLY?)
But at no point have I heard of any whisper of providing 1Gb/s to the home. I’ve been adding 10GE & 10G SDH channels up and down this country, and the typical equipment is capable of handling only 80 x 10Gb/s at every node. And that is fully expanded racks. With things like PMD greatly affecting 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s wavelengths, I wonder if existing fiber would have to be replaced to make this possible.
Furthermore, assuming this is 1Gb/s Ethernet, do you know anybody with a computer capable of handling this? I’m not sure my i7 Extreme could do much with it. Using RAM drives on two computers with Intel Extreme processors, with electrical ethernet cards, things max-out around 700ish Mb/s, due to ether overheads, so I watch this space with interest.
With this speed being common though, you wouldn’t need to download anything anymore….just grab, enjoy, and delete. Nice.
Interesting point “NotMyUsualid” has made on several levels. I was left wondering just how much internet speed disk writes could cope with because they will be directly related.
That said, once solid state drives are common place (affordable and can start to match the size of existing disk drives). SSD (Solid state hard drives) will never be an issue because they can be anywhere as much as 20 or so times faster and writing information to the solid state disk than the much more current but commonplace standard disks with moving parts.
The capacity of the Exchange would surely need to be upgraded to take this much boaster 1Gb (giga bits) in to account.
There are 8 bits to a byte, so 1 giga bit (what is potentially going to be offered over the next 5 years I expect) is equal to 125 mega bytes; to achieve 1GB (giga byte), we’d need a whopping 8 Gb (giga-bit) internet speed. 20 years or more away from that eventuality I’d say.
I am with virgin and get 20mbps I would consider moving to bt if they had 1gbps, Its just a matter of time until we have connections like South Korea