I've seen the future of broadband: BT's vision of tomorrow...

Broadband Genie editor Chris Marling takes a first-hand look at BT's answer to Virgin Media's 50Mb 'super-fast' broadband.

Back when I was getting moaned at for hogging the telephone line, trying to look at my email as the little 'loading' bar chugged slowly across the screen on dial-up, it was hard to believe a decade later everything from global multi-player gaming to HD home security would be coming down the same achingly slow pipes. But Virgin Media's 50Mb broadband – complete with very little speed degradation over distance – is now a reality.

So it was with some bemusement I headed to leafy Muswell Hill, London N3, to visit BT's new shop and experience 'the future of broadband' – which is apparently 'up to' 40Mb. While Muswell Hill is bereft of a Tube station, or even British Rail, you'd think a carrier pigeon would've got the BT staff the news about the advances in cable? It could've been worse – they could've sent me to BT's other test bed in Cardiff.

Super fast broadband

BT's glossy pamphlet advertising its shiny new product doesn't harp on about the 40Mb speed as much as Virgin Media does about its 50Mb, and rightly so; instead it sticks to the 'super fast' tag, nice arty pictures of fibre-optic cables and the benefits thereof. Although, seeing as 100Mb is already de rigueur in a lot of countries (and currently being heavily tested by BT in Ebbsfleet Valley, Kent, where testers are receiving the fastest residential speeds in the UK), what will that be called when it arrives: 'REALLY super fast broadband', perhaps?

And while it's easy to take the mickey out of BT's ill advised 'future of broadband' message, in reality this is the future of broadband for the 50 per cent or so of the population that aren't currently covered by the cable network. That said, Muswell Hill does have Virgin Media coverage, so it may not have been the most advisable place for the start of the 'it's 10Mb slower than our rivals' revolution.

The good news

Unlike cable, this is fully fibre (not a coaxial-fibre hybrid like Virgin's) and the majority of its fibre roll-out will be FTTC (fibre to the cabinet - the green street cabinet near your home), delivering the as-mentioned 'up to' 40Mb (potentially rising to 60Mb and eventually 100Mb). This should sort out a lot of the 'up to' problems experienced by BT line broadband users, as fibre-optic cables are much better for broadband than the current copper ones, meaning distance from the exchange will not be so much of an issue.

Once up and running, anyone used to an 8Mb line (which for many equates to 2Mb) can't fail to be impressed. Multiple online functions run in tandem with ease across a number of machines, with streaming and downloading of large files and high definition content running falter free. It also opens the way for advanced television services: fully internet enabled television with the capabilities to include social networking, PIP chat, content sharing, data dumping etc.

The bad news

While BT's free upgrade to 20Mb broadband from 8Mb broadband is being rolled out, it would've been asking a bit much for this one to have been gratis too. The reality is this is a much bigger deal: you'll need a new Home Hub (which will have an extra port to accommodate the fibre modem) and, frankly, someone has to pay for the infrastructure. The line from your street's green telephone cabinet to the home will still be copper.

While we were shown nice demos of how BT Vision will potentially be able to utilise this speedy new connection, there are no tie-ins planned for its launch. However, BT is starting to give the technology to companies to get testing, so expect the likes of 360-degree TV and 3D TV to become fact rather than fiction in the near future.

Unfortunately the Muswell Hill testers are still experiencing the speed degradation problems suffered by the rest of us, because some of the journey taken by their broadband is still across the copper network to the street cabinet: not a great way to preview a new product. Participants are guaranteed a speed of at least 15Mb during the trial though, and most can expect speeds in the high 20s and 30s.

Big (for) business

The upstairs of the Muswell Hill store is dedicated to showing what super fast broadband can do for businesses and this may well be where BT really strikes gold. The main message is 'concurrency' – using fewer lines to do more work. The high def IPCCTV demo was impressive, and importantly dead easy to use, and this was a recurring theme: save money by having a smaller number of lines and cheaper, lower end products doing advanced work reliably (cloud computing, massed VoIP lines, high quality conferencing etc). As Virgin Media continues to focus on the consumer market, this really is a no-brainer for BT.

So does it work?

In short, yes – it was impressive when compared to your typical 8Mb line: hardly surprising, but good to see it working well. The store's fibre connection is apparently averaging around 36Mb, but we only saw results about three times faster than the 8Mb line it was running against (it was also running at around 2Mb for uploads at times). Shame they hadn't run a Virgin Media line in to compare against, but hey ho.

The ball got rolling in Muswell Hill at the end of August, with current BT customers targeted with flashy silver envelopes (ooh, shiny). They seem to have done the trick, as 1,000 people have already signed up and engineers have started to connect them. The store opened mid September and had a steady stream of curious consumers while we were there.

When, where and how much?

More good news: BT's super fast broadband will start to be rolled out in January 2010, with the claim that 10 million homes and businesses will have access to fibre by 2012, just in time to watch our athletes fail miserably and cry at the Olympics on BT Vision in glorious HD.

The areas to get 40Mb first were announced back in March, with 29 exchange cabinets including areas of Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow, London and Greater Manchester benefiting from this "early deployment".

Pricing will be “very competitive”, apparently. Make of that what you will, but don't expect too many price hints much before launch. Unfortunately it is also too early to talk about the dreaded traffic 'shaping' too. Hey, we had to ask...