At this point it’s important to recognise that a true fibre optic broadband service is one that takes the optical cable all the way from the telephone exchange and into your home or office, which is technically capable of delivering Gigabit speeds (i.e. 1Gbps is roughly the same as 1000 Megabits).
Some of the most common examples of such products are Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) and Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP), which are almost identical.
Another solution, Fibre-to-the-Building (FTTB), still requires a small amount of internal copper or coax wiring but this usually isn’t enough to cause a huge detriment and the optical fibre itself still reaches your building (e.g. useful for connecting older apartment blocks and, in our opinion, good enough to be called a fibre optic service). You’ll notice FTTC in the diagram too but we’ll come back to that.
A quick glance at today’s broadband market shows that almost all of the biggest ISPs now offer some form of “superfast broadband” service, which Ofcom loosely defines as any connection able to offer internet download speeds of greater than 24Mbps (Megabits per second). Most providers promote such packages as being “fibre broadband” or “fibre optic broadband” products.
The problem is many of the associated “fibre optic” packages aren’t true optical connections and some are significantly different. To better illustrate this ISPreview.co.uk has extracted several descriptions for related packages from four of the markets largest broadband providers; BT, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband (BskyB) and TalkTalk.
TalkTalk Description
“Superfast Fibre Broadband is made up of Fibre Optic cables, which offer some of the fastest broadband speeds available. Fibre optic cables use thin strands of glass to transmit information at the speed of light. This means your broadband connection will be so much faster and more reliable allowing you to download and stream video content, download files, as well as uploading photos in flash. The whole family can enjoy the internet the same time without your broadband slowing down.”
Sky Broadband Description
“Sky Fibre Unlimited is a fibre optic broadband product. It uses Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) technology which is being rolled out across the UK by Openreach.”
BTInfinity Description (FTTC)
“BT Infinity uses the latest in fibre optic broadband technology to deliver the internet at speeds that are eight times faster than the UK average. Instead of sending electric signals through copper wires, BT Infinity sends information down a fibre optic network, giving you a faster, smoother online experience.”
Virgin Media Description
“The mega speeds of up to 100Mb that you can get with Virgin Broadband are thanks to fibre optic cable. It’s made from strands of glass as thin as hair, which carry information by light. This is much, much faster than the copper telephone wire used by other providers. And, unlike broadband down your phone line, fibre optic broadband doesn’t get slower the further away your house is from the telephone exchange.”
It’s interesting to note that most of the descriptions are at least partly accurate because they loosely describe what a fibre optic cable is, yet this often differs from the product being sold. Indeed most of the above packages are in fact based off some form of either Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC), Fibre-to-the-Node (FTTN) or a similar service.
Crucially neither FTTN nor FTTC take the fibre optic cable directly to your home or building. For example, FTTC delivers a fast fibre optic cable to BT’s street level cabinets, while the remaining connection (between cabinets and homes) is done using VDSL2 (similar to existing ADSL solutions but faster over shorter lines) via existing copper cable; these “last mile” runs of copper wire can be as long as several kilometres.
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