BT announce new SDSL rollout

BT today announced a huge acceleration in the rollout of its wholesale
symmetric broadband (SDSL) services, with a further 1,000 exchanges to
be upgraded for SDSL in a 12 month programme from April 2005.

The 1,000 exchanges to be earmarked for upgrade will be selected using
feedback from BT Wholesale's service provider customers as to where
they have customer demand - and on the density of small and medium
businesses (SMEs) in the exchange area.

Bruce Stanford, products director for BT Wholesale, said: "This is a
significant step forward which will bring 512Kb/s SDSL within reach of
more than two thirds of UK businesses. We believe the market for SDSL
will grow as awareness increases and new applications are developed.

"The plans announced today will give service providers additional
flexibility to widen their portfolio and will also give more certainty
about the potential market which can be addressed when service
providers develop new SDSL based products and services."

The details of the 12 month upgrade programme will be revealed in two
phases with the first 500 exchanges announced at the end of January and
the next 500 in August 2005. Feedback received from service providers
before the end of June 2005 on where they have customer demand for SDSL
will be considered when confirming which areas will be included in the
1,000 exchange rollout.

Under the existing deployment plan BT Wholesale will have SDSL service
available from 224 exchanges at the end of November 2004 rising to 300
by the end of March 2005.

BT Wholesale's BT IPStream Symmetric and BT DataStream Symmetric
products give the same rate of data transfer upstream as downstream and
are sold on a wholesale basis to service providers who retail SDSL
services to SMEs and other end users.

SDSL is particularly suitable for end-users such as SMEs, people in
remote offices or teleworkers who require business-class connectivity
to their service provider for applications such as fast file transfer
and web hosting.

From
http://www.btplc.com/News/Articles/S...1-28486e5b7c23
Regards
Sunil