The Capel Exchange Upgrade The following is the latest news, as of 24 February 2012. The upgrade of Capel Exchange took place on 23 February 2012. In summary: 93.2% of customers can now get between 15 and (up to) 100Mbps - BT Infinity, 4.6% can now get between 2 and 15Mbps, 2.2% got between "no change" and 2Mbps. Most of the properties using BT Infinity received fibre all the way to the property - i.e. up to 100Mbps. The Capel Exchange is now one of the best enabled in the country and BT has delivered way beyond its Race to Infinity promise. This was achieved by upgrading three existing cabinets (one in Anstie Lane and two in Horsham Road) to FTTC (fibre to the cabinet, then existing copper to the property) and five other existing units to FTTP (fibre all the way to the customers' properties). A few words of explanation might assist at this point. For FTTP (Fibre To The Premises), there are no cabinets to speak of. Instead, there are manifolds, connection units and nodes which take the place of "cabinets" and are extremely compact, considering the number of connections in each unit. They are located in underground chambers in FTTP areas and are often retrofitted to the top of poles or in the ground near to existing poles. For FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet), the cabinets act like mini-exchanges with a bridge between the new and old to provide telephone and broadband services. FTTP is no longer a "trial service", having become a full product from mid-November 2011. There are trials still on-going for various other products connected and associated with FTTP, but these are more to do with the background architecture and servers than the physical fibre link. BT and some specialist ISPs currently support FTTP and this is likely to become more widespread over the next year or so. The Capel Exchange upgrade was an infrastructure enhancement and no one was required to change their current telecommunications provider in order to enjoy the benefits. Nevertheless, we are all likely to remember where the money to upgrade the exchange came from when considering telecommunications providers in the future! Especially when Virgin's current TV advertisement with Usain Bolt has been offset by a price rise for new and existing customers. BT's Infinity pricing is available by clicking here. Other packages (e.g. 20Mbps broadband) are available and the actual performance achieved will also be significantly improved by the infrastructure upgrade. Keep visiting this page for further updates as they emerge.

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