Quote from BT Wholesale spokesperson, 30th June 2004

You may be interested to know how we have arrived at the dates for the Broadband rollout. Firstly the BT Core network teams undertook an extensive investigation of the whole BT fibre and SDH network to determine which exchanges had sufficient network available to enable them for Broadband now. Those that didn't then had new network elements planned from them to the nearest BT ATM node.

In parallel, investigations were also carried out on the local accommodation and power at the 1000+ sites to ensure the buildings could accommodate the new ADSL equipment. Again, those buildings that couldn't had bespoke jobs raised to bring them up to the required Broadband standard. Lastly a separate team looked at the likely take-up at each exchange over the next few years and dimensioned the ADSL equipment accordingly - with our three Broadband suppliers; Alcatel, Marconi and Fujitsu.

We then put all this information together and each exchange received an RFS date appropriate to its core backhaul, accommodation & power and ADSL kit requirements. This work then produced a programme beginning in October 2004* running through to July 2005 which will see all these exchanges enabled for Broadband. At every stage the best possible dates were used to determine each RFS date."

* the reason the programme commences Oct. 2004 is that the preceding weeks are full now with sites that triggered organically through the Pre-Reg. scheme.