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Openreach networks division announced their plans to extend the trial of super-fast broadband technology to new locations at Highams Park in northeast London and Bradwell Abbey in Milton Keynes. It has promised that 20,000 homes will enjoy speeds of up to 100 MB by next March because of this trial. These new locations are an extension of last year’s initiative, which covered the site of Ebbsfleet Valley in Kent.

Using the new fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology, customers’ premises will be connected to the exchange through fibre optic cables, thereby bypassing the existing copper wiring that are notorious for their slow speeds.

BT is also scheduled to use fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) technology, which uses optic fibre to connect the exchange to the street and copper to connect the last leg from street to the customer’s residence. Both infrastructures offer an upload speed of up to 10 Mb. BT revealed its plans to provide super-fast broadband to 1.5 million customers by next summer, and it expressed its openness to accommodate new broadband providers in its initiative.

David Campbell, the managing director of next generation access at Openreach, stressed that the trail site of Ebbsfleet had provided good feedback and had helped BT to rectify its errors. He also revealed that BT is working closely with communications providers and regional development authorities in running trials in all the sites.

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The Register, an online news site, has reported that subscribers of Fasthosts’ services were left in the lurch over the weekend when one of the ISP’s Email Filters stopped functioning due to technical problems, and as a result the users were left without email accounts for the entire weekend.

Customers, in communication with The Register, complained that when they sent queries to the customer support team at Fasthosts from alternative addresses, they received no response, and that the Fasthosts website contained no information on the outage either. Time to switch broadband provider? - click on broadband deals for up-to-date info.

However, the ISP was quick to issue a statement, in an effort to reassure customers that things would get back to normal soon. A spokesperson for the service provider, in conversation with The Register, explained the causes behind the temporary lapse in services. He said that though most email accounts which went offline were brought back up in around forty-five minutes, some accounts (under a hundred) were found to have corrupt system files, causing them to stay down.

The ISP also stated that no email had been lost as a result of the outage - all emails had been retained and would shortly be redelivered to the intended recipients. An unreserved apology was also issued to everyone who was inconvenienced due to the incident. Anyone who is still having difficulty accessing their email has been requested to contact Fasthosts