By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • General Information • Home Entertainment • WiFi • • 0 Comments

How Does Broadband Internet Get From Your ISP To Your Computer?

wireless router, wifi router, router, wireless, digital broadband, broadband, digital, wireless, full fibre, fast fibre, superfast fibre, ultrafast fibre, What technology you have connecting your home to the World Wide Web will drastically affect the speed at which you can access broadband internet.

Up until recently almost all internet infrastructure would have been via ADSL, essentially the old phone cable networking which has been with us for generations. While the internet was a luxury that not everybody needed low speeds and a limited network were sufficient, but now that it’s considered a utility, and a part of the basket of goods by which the retail price index is measured.

Today, with the unrelenting demand for faster and faster broadband the old copper cables can’t cope. The technology was originally designed to transmit the human voice to other people (relatively) nearby. The human voice operates at around 50Hz and most phone calls people make were to friends and neighbours who live nearby. However, by introducing the internet to the equation the phone lines now need to deliver data at 2.45GHz all over the world.

To overcome the limitations a number of solutions have been invented. First among these is Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC). FTTC is based on fibre optic technology, taking advantage of the fact that by using light instead of electrical impulses to transmit data it can deliver speeds many times that which cable alone can provide. FTTC is something of a compromise in  terms of data speeds and convenience of installation. Fibre optic lines are installed as far as the kerbside cabinets you find at the end of most streets. From there they use the existing copper wires to connect your home to the web. That copper leg does slow the data down, however, because the rest of the data’s journey is fibre optic, the overall system is much faster than copper cable alone. FTTC involves using existing connections to the home, so there is no digging up pavements or installing new overhead lines to each property. Read more

By Dan Cash Briant Broadband • Broadband • General Information • Home Entertainment • WiFi • • • • 0 Comments

Full Fibre, FTTP, FTTH and FTTC. What Is Going On!?

fibre, fibre optic, fibre optic cable, FTTP, FTTH, FTTC, Full Fibre, Fibre Broadband, broadband, fast fibre, 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. Read more