FTTC & FTTH

How easy will it be for BT to upgrade FTTC to FTTH at a later stage? Is it just a matter of putting in fibre from the cabinet to the home?

In theory extending the fibre should be feasible, and would make the cabinet based electronics obsolete.

FTTC is largely irrelevant to FTTH. The lady at BT in a top job said they won't be doing FTTP where they have done FTTC anyway.

That will leve BT at a major disadvantage then. The roolout of FTTC at the rate BT are going and you need to be looking at what the market will neeed several years ahead and not what is the minimum requirement today

if the interest saved (or made) on the cost of FTTH is avoided for several years the FTTC pays for itself nicely and you can do FTTH later when it suits you.

I'm sure her policy will change to reflect the market, or that of her successor will.

Any word on what will happen to the people who have not had their cabinet upgraded and are on an FTTC exchange?

Will they get FTTH?

I guess they'll see how far they can stretch it first, they are talking about releasing higher speed variants of Infinity up to 60,70, 80Mb, possibly beyond.

Is 40Mbps a minimum requirement now? I'd say not

Not today but probably tomorrow

There are plenty of examples of this sort of thing. It is not so long ago a 50GBb Hard drive was regarded as large and no one could envisage needing anything larger now 1Tb is the norm. Same with processors & memory

I don't think we can put this in the same category as storage. The best bet is to base it on the speed increases we've seen over the last decade.

Are there any applications in these super fast broadband countries we hear about all of the time with their 100Mb and Gig access that they are using that we can't because of our slow speeds?

I expect 40Mbps would do the majority of people for years to come, some will always want more sure, but this is about the UK as a whole.

Not aware of the exact wording but if memory serves me right, it did not preclude the possibility of an exchange area being a mixture of the technologies, e.g. the cabs one side of the river being FTTC, but the other part of town being FTTP.

Where I believe no mixing at all is expected is that users on a cabinet will not see a mix of options.