BT is set to launch Gigabit fibre broadband - promising vast speed increases even for those currently using BT Infinity fibre broadband. 

BT says its service will be available from the off in "hundreds of cities, towns and villages" - more than two million households will be able to get it initially and you can register your interest now. These places predictably include the following large cities: Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Leeds, London and Manchester. BT says it has the ambition to reach around half of homes in the UK by the end of 2025.

The gigabit service will launch later this month and seems like it'll be expensive (not too surprising really). How do we know? Because BT isn't revealing pricing yet, saying it'll be "revealed in the coming weeks".

Virgin Media announced its gigabit service for cabled areas late last year and its packages start at £62 per month. 

The BT service will come into its own with busy homes outside of cabled areas, perhaps where businesses are also being run or where shared houses mean that many tens of devices are connected.

While it's obviously possible to stream 4K video and online game on current BT fibre, our ever-increasing bandwidth demands mean that several people are often using high-bandwidth apps at the same time. And then, of course, there's the potential of 8K streaming when that becomes more broadly available. 

Apparently there will be several "Full Fibre" plans incoming, so we'll wait to see what form those take in due course.