In Australia, the converged operators use 4G as a fall-back when fixed (NBN) services fail. To our knowledge, no operator in Australia has considered bonding mobile broadband with a fixed broadband service to improve throughput, perhaps it should be considered for those on FTTN long-copper.
The Hybrid Speed Boost offers an average download speed boost of 20Mbps, which BT claims is more than twice the average download speed for broadband connections.
Average upload speeds can be lifted to 10Mbps, ten times the average upload speed for copper lines.
Hybrid Speed Boost incurs no extra cost for new BT business broadband customers taking ADSL broadband plans. Existing customers can also benefit when they renew their plan.
BT is launching the product as an interim solution for small firms which are yet to be upgraded to fibre broadband.
BT aims to reach 25 million homes and businesses with full fibre by the end of 2026, working with its infrastructure partner, Openreach, which has already brought the technology to 7.2 million premises.
Openreach is currently building full fibre to around 50,000 premises a week, putting it on target to reach 10 million premises by the end of March 2023.
“Hybrid Speed Boost could revolutionise operations for small businesses that may currently be struggling with the required bandwidth to process large files, access cloud services or use HD video.”
“On average we’re now getting 30-40Mbps download speeds and 14-15Mbps upload – the uplift in speed is transformative for our business for when we’re meeting with clients and suppliers via video calls. There's no more buffering or dropped connections. Customer data downloads have got so much quicker too,” says Eat Me Events director Benjy Levey, a BT subscriber.
BT is also introducing Fibre 38, new landline free fibre broadband package which uses fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) technology and offers BT’s lowest prices for fibre-based business broadband.
It delivers minimum speeds of up to 38Mbps all without the need to add a phone line.
This first appeared in the subscription newsletter CommsWire on 26 May 2022.
