BT on Tuesday announced the start of its first major trial of G.fast technology to U.K. residents.
The trial is being run by the telco’s Openreach division, which will make it possible for eight retail operators to provide services to 2,000 homes and businesses in the town of Huntingdon over the coming weeks.
G.fast will enable BT to provide broadband services over the copper network at speeds of up to 330 Mbps, it said. The trial will last for six to nine months.
"The people of Huntingdon will play an extremely important role in helping us gauge how the technology performs, and how we might deliver ultrafast s peeds to more of the U.K. over the coming years," said Openreach CEO Joe Garner.
BT selected the English towns of Huntingdon and Gosforth for its G.fast trials earlier this year. In total, the trials will cover 4,000 homes and businesses.
On Tuesday the U.K. incumbent reiterated that if the trials are successful it will look to a wider G.fast deployment in 2016-17 as part of a plan to make 500 Mbps broadband available to most of the U.K. within a decade.
However, it added a caveat: the G.fast rollout will take place "if U.K. regulation continues to encourage investment," BT said.
U.K. regulator Ofcom is conducting a strategic review that will amongst other things examine the prospect of a full structural separation of BT and Openreach.
BT has warned that such a move could impact on its plans for ultrafast broadband rollout in the U.K. and could lead to delays in G.fast deployment. It is pushing ahead with G.fast at present, but has repeatedly indicated that future network investments will require regulatory certainty.
