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After two years of waiting since Openreach first made their new consumer Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband tiers – 1.2Gbps and 1.8Gbps – available across the UK market (here). BT’s own wholesale division has finally now launched related products on their platform for retail UK ISP partners to sell on to customers.
The impact of this change is likely to be limited as many ISPs are already harnessing networks from other wholesale suppliers that can support the new speed tiers, or even by building their own platforms independent of BTWholesale (e.g. EE, Zen Internet etc.). Suffice to say that quite a few Openreach based ISPs have already made retail packages available via the new tiers using those alternative approaches.
Nevertheless, there are still some retail providers that have opted to wait for BTW to play their slow game of industry catch-up, which in practice often leaves them stuck offering top speeds of no more than 1Gbps (frequently advertised as c.900Mbps – average speeds as at peak time).