BT is to more than double the number of homes able to use the company’s ultra-fast broadband network, in a major revision of its next-generation infrastructure plans.

BT’s network – offering download speeds of up to 100 megabits per second – will run past at least 2.5m homes by 2012, or 10 per cent of the UK’s households. When it unveiled the original plans in 2008, BT said the 100mbps network would only run past 1m homes.