BT has announced that the five millionth wholesale broadband customer had been connected a year ahead of schedule. Also, the last million customers were connected in just four months, so on average a customer is being connected to broadband every 10 seconds, said the firm.

Mark Blowers of analyst Butler Group commented, "You have to give BT credit for delivering ahead of time and it is moving in the right direction, but the main thing is the services and there doesn't seem to be much focus on delivering these."

BT chief executive Ben Verwaayen said BT's internal deployment of broadband encouraged it to do more to promote broadband to customers. "Broadband is fundamental to BT and was the best thing to happen to BT, since it fundamentally changed BT's attitude - internally, it was a mass medium for transformation."

However, Blowers said, "Other countries are way ahead of the UK, not just in speed of connections but also in the services delivered over these connections." Jill Ainscough, managing director at ISP Easynet, noted that other European countries have more than one wholesaler for unbundled local loop connections, but in this country there is only BT.

Currently, the highest broadband speed offered by BT is 2Mbit/s, although it has announced trials of 18Mbit/s systems. Responding to comments that ISPs are providing faster connection speeds than those currently offered by BT, Verwaayen said, "They buy the DSL access multiplexers from the same suppliers so everybody has the same stuff and can get the same speeds."

Looking ahead, Verwaayen said, "From an external perspective, [the five millionth broadband connection is] an important milestone, but the journey from now will be much more important and is about making broadband a competitive edge."

Meanwhile, Easynet has announced trials of a new ADSL2+ service slated to give users broadband speeds of up to 24Mbit/s, subject to industry technical forum approval for commercial use.

Easynet's David Rowe said, "We are undertaking a technical trial of ADSL2 and ADSL2+ in our LLU [local loop unbundled] network. We anticipate full commercial launch of ultra-fast broadband services in the second half of 2005."