The largest communications service provider in the UK, BT, will be investing about $3 billion to improve network speeds for many Brits. The money will go to securing "superfast" broadband for up to 10 million homes by 2012.

How fast is superfast? The luckiest people (and generally, those with the newer homes) that are able to get on a fibre-to-the-premise network can theoretically achieve speeds up 100 Mbps (megabits per second.) Most people however, will be connecting to the new highspeed network through their homes' copper cabling, which leads to a speed cap around 40 Mbps. Though BT does hope to raise this cap eventually to around the 60 Mbps mark with some new technologies they will be rolling out.

BT will be making this network available to other ISPs, selling wholesale broadband to companies such as Carphone Warehouse and BSkyB.

The move by BT has been seen as some as a response to earlier announcements from the Virgin Media group, which also plans to deliver more extensive high speed broadband to UK customers.