BT Wholesale in conjunction with the service providers has been testing an up to 8Mbps ADSL service for what seems forever. Today sees BT Wholesale announce the product.

From 31st March 2006 the product will go live on a national basis. The service should be available on around 5300 exchanges, which will cover around 99.6% of homes and businesses in the UK. The key component to the Max services is that they are rate adaptive (i.e. will run at the highest speed they can) in both the downstream and upstream directions, which should see the vast majority of lines running a lot faster than under the existing planning rules used by BT Wholesale.

The potential line speeds are 160kbps to 8192kbps downstream, with upstream from 160kbps to 448kbps on Max, and 832kbps on Max Premium. 78% of BT lines are expected to manage 4Mbps or faster, 6Mbps to around 42%. It should be pointed out that even if you get the full 8192kbps, this is actually 3.6 times faster than an existing 2Mbps line. This is because a 2Mbps line runs at 2272kbps so that with the network overheads people will see close to 2Mbps under ideal conditions, so an 8192kbps line speed will provide around 7.1 to 7.3Mbps of potential data speed.

First it was 512k, then 1Mbps, now 2Mbps, and soon to be 4Mbps or more.

Source [ADSL Guide]