BT claims 24Mbps available to half of UK

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Following a slow but sure roll out of its 21st Century Network, BT now reckons more than half of the UK can access download speeds of 24Mbps through its Wholesale Broadband Connect offering.

Broadband

BT has confirmed that half the country now has access to 24Mbps thanks to one of its products.

The 21st Century Network (21CN) Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) offering from the company uses ADSL2+ technology to reach the 24Mbps download speed and it has now installed this in more than 730 exchanges across the UK.

This equates to giving half of all homes and businesses access to the connection type.

WBC was first launched back in April 2008 but roll out has been relatively slow compared to other companies like Sky and TalkTalk, which have had the unbundled technology since the mid 2000s.

BT has been investing heavily in next-generation broadband. Some 1.5 billion of funding was announced back in July 2008, which was earmarked for getting broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps into 10 million homes by 2012.

Jennifer Scott
Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.