News Fibre To The Cabinet trial
July 2009 We are pleased to announce that we are part of the BT Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) trial and will be testing with a small group of customers over the coming month. When the service is fully launched we will be able to provide FTTC to customers wherever the network has been upgraded by BT.
FTTC is the next step in providing faster internet connectivity, especially to smaller communities and long telephone lines. The principle is simple - instead of trying to get broadband to go for several miles to the exchange, BT can run one fibre to the cabinet in the street and then get broadband to run for a few hundred metres from the cabinet.
Speed
Speeds of up to 40Mb/s download and possibly 5Mb/s upload have been suggested. The trial will give us a better idea of what will be achieved in practice.
Price
The install price is higher than a normal broadband line, probably nearer £100, but the ongoing costs are likely to be the same as our current broadband services.
Availability
As BT roll out. This is only available for cabinet fed customers. The availability checker will be updated to show FTTC availability.
Timescales
As BT roll out. We know BT are very keen on this.
Technical
The service includes a BT provided VDSL modem that provides a PPPoE interface. We will initially be supplying suitable PPPoE routers for the triallists and may be including these in the product launch. The installation requires a BT engineer visit. We will have more details once the service is trialled.
The current FireBrick FB105 will not be suitable for speeds of 40Mb/s, but FireBrick plan to launch a new product - hopefully later this year, which we expect will be able to handle not just one 40Mb/s line, but two of them bonded.
Is this fibre-optic broadband
Anyone selling you inexpensive fibre-optic broadband either does not understand the technical term or is at best misleading in their description.
Broadband is a term which means using a broad (wide) band (radio frequency band) to convey the data. Broadband on copper wires as used for ADSL uses multiple frequency slots each modulating part of the data and transfers the data over a wide band of frequencies. ADSL is broadband. Popular use is to refer to an ADSL internet connection as broadband which is correct, but people assume it means fast internet which it never did. The meaning is changing by usage.
Fibre-optic links use light. Light at a single frequency. A fibre-optic data link to your premises (and we do sell these) is as narrow a band as it is possible to have. The closest you get to fibre-optic broadband is DWDM which uses lots of different light frequencies to carry multiple data links on one fibre, but even this is not a particularly broad band of frequencies.
This service provides a fibre based link closer to your premises. That means the broadband over a copper pair from the cabinet to your premises has less distance to go and so can operate at higher data rates. We believe this is the same principle as some other internet providers that do claim to sell fibre-optic broadband. We would not lie to you by claiming we are providing broadband or internet service to you over fibre-optic cable when what comes in to your premises is, in fact, a copper line.
