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BT provides free 20Mbps broadband boost to customers

BT has announced that it will increase the speed available to its residential and business customers from 8Mbps to 20Mbps.

BT says that 549 telephone exchanges will initially benefit from the faster line speeds. These serve around 40 percent of the UK’s homes and businesses according to BT. The coverage is expected to extend to 55 percent by March 2010. Upload speeds will also improve to 1Mbps.

The higher speeds will immediately be available to business customers, presumably depending on whether they’re connected to one of the relevant exchanges. From early summer, new residential customers or customers who renew their contract in an enabled exchange area will also automatically be eligible for the up to 20Mbps broadband service.

The speed increase is based on BT’s 21CN platform, which is due to bring faster broadband speeds through ADSL2+ technology to all ISPs that use BT’s wholesale network.

However, as before, speeds will be subject to the distance to the exchange as well the quality of wiring in the home and how busy your local exchange is. So the line speed increase may not necessarily lead to an increase in broadband speed performance.

BT has another trick up its sleeve however. For those who have poor quality wiring in the home, it is offering the BT Broadband Accelerator, also known as the I-Plate, free to customers that it feels will benefit from it. The BT Broadband Accelerator is a bit of hardware that BT says eliminates electrical interference from telephone-extension wiring.

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