If you’re shopping around for a new broadband internet provider because your old one was too expensive or unreliable you’ve probably been introduced to some new terms which we shall attempt to explain.
You’ll no doubt have heard of FTTC, FTTP and FTTH. The good news is that Full Fibre, FTTP and FTTH are exactly the same thing. They stand for ‘Fibre To The Property’ and ‘Fibre To the Home’ so essentially they both mean that the fibre connection goes all the way from your local exchange down your street, across your garden, through the wall and into your router. Once its there it can deliver up to 900 Mbps which can then be distributed via Wi-Fi or an ethernet cable directly to a laptop or desktop machine, Smart devices and TV.
So what is FTTC?
FTTC is ‘Fibre To The Cabinet’. The cabinet in question is the green phone cabinet you probably have at the end of your street. Sometimes you’ll see a phone engineer sitting in front of one deftly knitting among a bird’s nest of cables and you wonder how they can possibly make any sense of the jumble of wires in front of them. So the fibre goes from the exchange, down your street, but instead of going across your garden and into your wall, it stops at this cabinet and gets connected to your copper phone line instead. Because the copper wire is already installed right up the phone socket in your home it’s much cheaper to install and far less disruptive as there is much less digging of residential streets involved. Dynamic Line Management takes care of ensuring that your connection remains, error free, fast and stable automatically.
What’s the difference between Full Fibre FTTP and FTTC?
Both deliver speeds faster than ADSL (copper cable throughout) reliably but because the FTTP fibre goes all the way into the router instead of stopping and converting to copper cable at the cabinet it is much faster. Because FTTC has that slowing copper element just before the data gets to your house it’s worth checking your data speeds from time to time to ensure that you’re still getting a reasonable speed for the price you’re paying.
Another thing to bear in mind is futureproofing the service you receive. While FTTC is nearly as fast as Full Fibre, and it’s cheaper and easier for the ISP to install, copper does have a limited lifespan and it will need to be replaced eventually. When it is, it will be with fibre which can be expanded and improved upon as technology advances over the years. So if you have the option to choose FTTP now, as you do with CItyFibre and Briant Broadband installing the necessary infrastructure throughout the Worthing and Adur region, it’s a great time to go Full Fibre.
More on the merits and demerits of Full Fibre FTTP and FTTC
FTTP is an overall better solution as it provides a stable, reliable complete fibre connection from the home or business to the local exchange, and then on to the internet itself. It’s designed to deliver astounding data volumes at incredibly high speed, and that speed will only increase as the technology for processing it advances.
It used to be prohibitively expensive though, meaning that outside of cities it wasn’t usually an option. However, with the fibre infrastructure rollout which aims to have more than 99% of properties in the UK connected to a fibre option by 2030, availability will not be a problem for long.
On the other hand FTTC has the advantage of being available to most homes and businesses. It offers impressive speeds over the old copper cable network, and your ISP likely supplies it to you already.
Briant Broadband and our partners at Cityfibre are busy installing FTTP wherever we can, and in those areas where we aren’t able to reach at the moment we provide a wireless option which can deliver between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps. While that’s only a fraction of the 900 Mbps we can provide through our Full Fibre FTTP option, it is still considerably faster than many other options available to towns and villages which are still using ADSL or copper cable networks.
And if you live in an area where FTTP is available, why not choose Briant Broadband as your internet provider? We offer unbeatable speeds to our customers with flexible plans you can change whenever you need to without incurring admin fees, and you get the kind of customer service you can only expect from a genuinely local business.
To find out more visit our website or call 01903 221999 to talk to one of our broadband installation experts.