What is FTTC?


Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) is the latest generation of BT Broadband. In enabled areas, giving a 4-5x increase in the current speed.

At the moment rollout is limited and availability is based on two requirements:

  1. Your local telephone exchange has been upgraded
  2. Your street cabinet has been linked to the exchange via fibre optic cable

The first requirement is the easy part – a lot of exchanges, especially in cities have already been upgraded or have a date for the upgrade. The second is more complicated!

Your cabinet may only serve a handful of homes and/or businesses, making it unprofitable for BT to dig up the pavement and re-link it to the local exchange. To increase the rollout rate, many local governments have applied for funding from the EU; this combined with local government money and BT infrastructure funding mean that many Counties will have superfast broadband to around 80% of premises by 2015 – Better Broadband for Norfolk

This still means that for many rural counties, a lot of locations will still be on a less than 24 Megabits per second connection. There are alternatives specifically targeted at rural “not-spots” such as wireless broadband.

If your premises has been connected, then Openreach has a list of providers. All offer a similar service, with a range of speeds and download caps. An engineer will visit to replace your telephone socket faceplate and install a VDSL2 modem. You will need to provide or purchase a ROUTER (your existing ADSL modem/router will not work). We can advise on a range of firewalls to keep your broadband secure and controlled that work with any type of Internet connection.

Please contact us for more information.