Fibre Broadband

Over the last 10 years there has been a shift in priority and deployment of broadband service within the UK to a fibre based broadband product for both residential and business premises.

This can be split down into two fibre broadband types:

Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) – this was BT Openreach’s initial idea and deployment to create a faster broadband service across the UK. Effectively, by providing a dedicated fibre connection from the local BT exchange to the local BT green cabinets in the road, they effectively moved the exchange speed closer to the end user premises, whether residential or business, so thereby increasing the available broadband speed at the end of the connection. however, this still relies on using a copper pair of wires for the last link from the BT green cabinet to the premises and so this effectively caps the speed that can be achieved to <80MB download and <20MB upload. In addition, the quality of this cable, its route (i.e., overhead or underground) and distance from the green cabinet can also have an effect on speed and reliability.

Fibre To The Premises/Home (FTTP/FTTH) – this is now the preferred fibre broadband product that BT Openreach as well as all other fibre broadband networks are rolling out across the UK. As it uses fibre optic cable directly from the exchange to the premises, there is no loss of speed over distance like FTTC. In addition, there is effectively no limitation on speed that can be achieved due to the capacity of the speed of light to transmit data. However, it is effectively limited by the network providers hardware providing the connection within the exchange and this is currently up to 1GB/s download and 220 MB/s upload