BT has said it could deliver ultra-fast broadband to 10 million homes and businesses by 2020, but only if customers pay higher bills to fund it.
Controversially, this could mean that even customers who don’t get faster speeds would pay more.
The company’s Openreach division, which runs the UK’s broadband infrastructure (telephone wires, ducts, cabinets and exchanges), said the work would cost between £3bn and £6bn.
It wants to deliver speeds of 1Gbps (1,000Mbps) using a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which delivers fast broadband straight to households. Currently, fibre cables mostly run to a street cabinet, from where Victorian-era slower copper cables take over. Replacing these would mean digging up roads across the UK.
Openreach claims the companies that rent cables on its network, including Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone, say there’s…