Last week BT Openreach announced that their 110Mbps fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) service is going into "early market deployment launch" on the 31st of October. This means FTTP will come out of trial and it will be additionally be available for purchase through other service providers. This announcement clarifies for the first time that we in Forest Hill were never going to see go-live for FTTP until after those trials were complete and that all previously published data was therefore inaccurate.

Only 6 areas are planned to be live on this date and Forest Hill (LSFOR) is not amongst them.

So September has passed and whilst the completion of the trials phase is good news and it possibly means that we might finally see super-fast broadband network in Forest Hill, we here have no further firm information as to when this might occur. I have seen no confirmation of a possible December (2011) go-live.

I cannot establish when or if the FTTP install is complete for the exchange but I have seen extensive work being done on the installation of DP's and manifolds

Rumours had it that if and when we could connect to fibre, the copper connections woud have to be retained for voice services a la POTS. BT has confirmed this in that FTTP is going live without a voice component and that Fibre Voice Access is expected to launch next year.

BT Openreach also confirms that as this is an 'early deployment', only tentative steps are being taken and service levels are not being guaranteed until there has been further analysis of the service.

Curiously and in typically BT comedic style Openreach has separately announced that at the point at which the 110 mbps service will go-live, the delivered speed will be upgraded to 300Mbps in early 2012. This announcement must be viewed as having its feet firmly planted in the "more jam tomorrow" ethos as opposed to the much more preferrable "you can connect to super-fast broadband network today".

For levels of existing services, performance continues to fluctuate wildly by as much as 40-50% and particularly high number of drop-outs and internet disconnects in the early days of October are being experienced.