BT Wholesale has confirmed the 148 exchanges that will bring its Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) service to more than 16 million UK homes & businesses by winter 2010.

The growth of higher speed broadband services continues, with BT Wholesale significantly expanding WBC copper service availability. The 148 exchanges represents a further 6% of UK homes and businesses, bringing the total of enabled and to be enabled named exchanges to 61%.

Subject to demand, BT Wholesale intends to roll out these higher speed copper services to exchanges serving around 75% (or 20million end users) by Spring 2011

Already exchanges serving more than half of UK homes and businesses have been enabled and BT Wholesale says it is on track to meet its 55 per cent enablement target by end of March 2010.

BT Wholesale's new service - offering an up to 24Mbit/s broadband - is now available from 817 exchanges capable of serving 13.8 million end users.

"We expect this to rise to 851 exchanges serving 14 million end users this month and, following today's announcement, will increase this to 999 exchanges bringing 24Mbit/s broadband within reach of 16.2 million end users by winter 2010," said a spokesperson.

Already more than 800,000 end users are taking BT Wholesale's ADSL2+ copper next generation broadband service, with more than 50 (WBC & WBMC customers) adding around 20-30,000 end user customers each week, says the firm.

In January 2010, BT Wholesale added a fibre access option to its Wholesale Broadband Connect family of services. The rollout of fibre WBC services is being expanded in line with Openreach's rollout programme which is set to reach at least 10 million (or 40%) UK homes and businesses by summer 2012.