What is FTTP?

FTTP, or full fibre, is being rolled out across the country to deliver lightning fast internet speeds. It will be expanding to reach many more locations UK-wide over the next few years and is absolutely central to the government’s plan to get homes and businesses better connected.

It paves the way to help us work from home better, to connect all our smart home devices, to get the most out of streaming services like Netflix, to improve our gaming experience, or just to smoothly and reliably connect even the largest of households.

The bottom line is that it promises much faster and more reliable internet connectivity. If that’s all you need to know, then you can stop reading here.

But what exactly is it, what makes it different, and why is it better than a traditional broadband connection?

If you want to know the answers to those questions, read on…

Better broadband

There are basically three different types of broadband: ADSL, FTTC and FTTP. Two of those connections rely on old-fashioned copper wires. One provides a much more modern type of connection right up to your home.

ADSL (aka ‘fast’ or ‘copper’ broadband) pretty much follows the exact same route as your phone line.

The local exchange is connected to your nearest street cabinet by copper, and copper is also used to connect the cabinet to your home. That means, unsurprisingly, that your data is carried all the way to and from the exchange over copper wire. And that has a couple of disadvantages.

First and foremost, data signals tend to deteriorate rather quickly over copper wire, which in the real world means you lose a lot of speed. That’s why the average download speed for ADSL broadband is around 10Mbps (that’s megabits per second by the way; there are eight megabits in a megabyte if you’re counting, so don’t confuse the two!).

Copper is also susceptible to interference from electrical signals, can be easily damaged and is also vulnerable to fire and even extreme weather – in other words, it’s not the most reliable medium for carrying data.

FTTC (aka ‘fibre to the cabinet’ or ‘superfast’ broadband) is a step up from your basic all copper broadband connection.

Here, the exchange connects to your local street cabinet via fibre optic cable. That fibre optic cable is more reliable than copper, and also far less susceptible to signal loss (which means it’s not going to slow down your connection speed to anywhere near the same extent).

The last part of an FTTC connection though – from the cabinet to your house – still uses copper wires, making this ‘last mile’ as it is commonly known susceptible to the same problems as an ADSL connection. Given that much less copper wire is used overall however, you can still expect much faster download speeds up to an average of around 66Mbps. For many homes that’s plenty fast enough, but it still pales in comparison to a full fibre connection.

FTTP (aka ‘fibre to the premises’, ‘ultrafast’ or full fibre broadband) does exactly what the name would suggest. It completely eliminates the copper wire, providing a fibre optic connection all the way to your house.

With fibre replacing the copper from the ‘last mile’, you’ve now got the fastest, most reliable technology all the way, which means far less signal loss and average download speeds up to 900Mbps!

The other advantage of a full fibre connection is there’s no longer any need for an old-fashioned phone line. That copper connection is totally unnecessary, so if you don’t need a house phone, you don’t need to pay any line rental either. This is just modern connectivity all the way.

That’s all there is to it, really. What you do with all that extra speed – from 4K movies to blockbuster games, reliable home working or all that and more – is up to you!