It's been a while since we last blogged about an increase in central capacity on our Up to 8Mbps 20CN network, I think the last time was way back in November of last year. Since then we've revamped our products, have officially launched 'Up to 20Mbps' and been busy in the background moving customers across to BT Wholesale's 21CN network. Because of this, we've focussed more on making sure we've enough bandwidth to cope with the increased numbers on the 21CN platform. It's for this reason that you might have seen one of the many announcements recently about us increasing the capacity on our 21CN host links. Well, if you haven't got ADSL2+ in your area (you can check here), then you needn't worry as we've not forgotten about you - oh no siree! Yesterday we lit almost a *full* 622Mbps central pipe for customers still on the 20CN network. This basically means that there's now more bandwidth to be shared amongst everybody on 'Up to 8Mb' 20CN platform. In the past, we've typically only lit one segment at a time (there are four segments per 622Mbps pipe). On this occasion though, we've gone the whole shebang and lit the lot!... Well almost the lot, we have had a bit of a problem getting one of the LTS's online (There are three LTS's per segment), but we expect that to be sorted shortly. Customers connecting to the new segment will see their traffic routed through the gateway known as pcl-ag02. NB: It's worth noting the gateway checker might not work for some customers connecting to the new pipe, we're looking into this as per the forum post here. We've activated this bandwidth to accommodate the expected increase in customer numbers over the coming months, and the almost guaranteed increase in average usage as the year progresses. Also worth a mention is the fact that the Olympic Winter Games start this week and a lot of people are likely to be watching online. 
When new capacity is added to the network, it takes time for it to balance and for a representative proportion of the customer base to connect to the new segments. In order to speed up this process we might need to briefly disconnect some broadband customers from the Internet. If we decide to do this then we’ll announce further details as a planned maintenance notice nearer the time. Some of the more astute of you may be asking what happened to Plusnet 16 that was mentioned in the last capacity increase announcement? It's nothing to worry about, it's just that there were some unforeseen delays which resulted in Plusnet 17 being commissioned first (we ordered both at roughly the same time). On a similarly related note, we've just upped the available bandwidth on the 21CN platform as well! Share
More capacity for 2010!