BT has recently announced some fairly significant developments which will please shareholders in the firm as well as business and home broadband customers around the country.

The first piece of news highlights the fact that BT has just passed the five million customer mark for its broadband service. It sent the lucky 5 millionth customer, a chip shop worker from Glasgow, to see the Winter Olympics to mark the milestone which assures BT’s place as the UK largest fixed line broadband provider.

The second exciting development came when BT announced that it was currently ahead of schedule for the roll out of the latest fibre optic broadband technology. The intention now is to make fibre optic broadband available to 10 million customers around the UK in time for the 2012 Olympics and so far the £1.5 billion project is moving along swiftly.

In the last two years BT revealed that it has gained the custom of over one million new business and home broadband users and a spokesperson for the company said that the growth in the number of business customers signing up for broadband was set to continue as higher speeds become available across a wider area.

BT said that with the current work rate it would be able to connect 4 million customers to the internet using the new fibre optic network by the end of 2010 and the pressures of being official communications partner and sponsor of the 2012 Olympics are clearly helping BT to stay on task and stick to its promises.

BT CEO Ian Livingstone said that they expected to gain support from the government in order to ensure that businesses could have access to high speed broadband connections in time for 2012.

It is clear that by the end of next year people looking to compare business broadband packages will be faced with a much wider selection of high speed connections than those that are currently available.