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Is this just TalkTalk or are BT facing a serious threat?

BT's dominance of the fixed-line telecoms infrastructure in the UK may be about to face its biggest challenge yet.

Sky, TalkTalk, Fujitsu and CityFibre have joined forces to provide businesses and residents of York with an ultra-fast network.

The four telecoms groups intend to smash current broadband speeds by installing fibre optic cable all the way up to buildings (FTTP), which removes the bottleneck of the conventional copper last mile (either from exchange to premises, or from street cabinet to premises) and should be capable of providing speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second (1Gbps).

Is this just TalkTalk or are BT facing a serious threat

"If the price is right and the group rolls out the first phase in a timely manner, this could really be a killer project," said Hughes fibre specialist Gus. "It will certainly put York on the map in terms of digital and web industry and I would like to see it set the scene for Government sponsored digital hot-spot Enterprise Zones nationwide, aimed at attracting high tech innovation." He went on to say: "As for serious competition to BT, I don’t think even Sky and Talk Talk contemplate that - BT covers 99% of the country and is still growing. Installing fibre, even renting (mostly BT’s) existing underground network would run into the billions of pounds and take more than 10 years to put in place."

The first phase of the York network is expected to reach around 20,000 people (10% of York's population) but as of yet there is no timeline or pricing information available.


Will the combined telecoms group pull this off? Will BT fight back?