BT Group PLC on Tuesday said it has begun its first field trial with its new ultrafast broadband technology, dubbed G.fast, in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. The result, which additionally obviates the need for moving copper to improve speeds, has been clocking in at around 330Mbps, more than ten times the current UK average.

Joe Garner, CEO of BT Openreach, said: “Today is the start of a new chapter in building Britain’s connected future”.

Competitors have called for the division to be separated from BT in the past over concerns surrounding the fairness of BT both running telecom services and controlling the infrastructure over which the services are run, with rival Sky PLC having said that there would likely be “significant net benefits from establishing Openreach as an independent company”.

The company has pioneered research into G.fast technology since 2007 and has been heavily involved in driving the creation of global industry standards in that time.

With regards to the economics of G.fast versus FTTH we hope that Openreach will consider a demand led scheme with people paying a deposit that guarantees them G.fast or if enough deposits are placed then rather than install a G.fast node a full FTTH deployment may go ahead.

BT is working on the trials with worldwide vendors ADTRAN, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei, and also with chipset manufacturers and global standards bodies. In May, some tests were completed in real-world conditions in Swansea.

Extending the range of frequencies available through existing copper networks, G.fast provides “ultrafast” broadband speeds, defined as speeds of 100Mbps or over.

BT has revealed that it can deliver 700 Mbps speed on a 66 meter long cable.

BT claims that if successful, the trials could pave the way for delivering speeds of a few hundred megabits per second to millions of homes across the UK by 2020.

“However it’s important to note that even with the added investment into G.Fast technology, the combined upload and download speed is 1Gb – with Fibre-to-the-Premises residents and businesses can enjoy symmetrical 1Gb broadband speeds”.

However, BT’s press release comes with a thinly veiled threat to regulator Ofcom and the competition authorities, who are musing over whether to split off BT’s networking arm, Openreach. “BT is harnessing its world-class technology and engineering expertise to help the UK lead the way on ultrafast broadband and remain a world leading digital economy”.