FTTC - Fiber To The Cabinet
FTTC is here now!
What is FTTC?
FTTC stands for Fiber to the Cabinet. It's a new sort of Broadband internet connection which, instead of using your existing copper phone line all the way from the telephone exchange to your house or office, uses a fiber-optic connection from the exchange to the "street cabinet" nearest to you. From there to your office it still uses the exiting copper wire. By reducing the amount of copper wire used in the connection the network is able to provide much higher connection speeds in both directions, and the loss of speed and reliability introduced by the copper line and connections in it are reduced.
Where traditional ADSL broadband offers speeds up to 8mb/sec or up to 24mb/sec on the newer exchanges, FTTC offers speeds of up to 40mb/sec, and upload speds of up to 2mb/sec or 10mb/sec depending on service level.
What is FTTH/FTTP?
The H stands for Home - the P for Premesis. This is a version of FTTC which brings the fiber-optic connection all the way to your house or office building. It has the potential to be even faster and more reliable than FTTC, but it is going to be quite rare, especially in the early days of this service.
Who can get FTTC?
BT are rolling out FTTC servics all over the country. Mainly in towns, sadly, despite the fact that this service is the solution rural internet users. However, wheras for ordinary "ADSL" Broadband, it was sufficient to know if your local exchange had been provisioned, with FTTC we also need to discover if your street has service. The easiest way to find out what is available to you now, or when you might be able to use this service, is to phone us for a chat. With your phone number and postcode we can quickly find out what's going on and put you in the picture.
Once your exchange is enabled and your street has been provisioned with the required fiber-optic link, then, you can order this service! It's open to anyone from basic home users to large business premesis to use, and the rates are not much different to what you pay for ordinary broadband. Prices start at £25+vat per month.
When can I get FTTC?
Provided your exchange and street cabinet have been converted, we can order this service for you at once and you can expect to be "on line" using it within two to four weeks, depending how soon we can book a BT Openworld engineer in your area.
Do I need a BT engineer visit?
Yes, sadly, at the moment this service is only installed by a BT engineer visiting, making the necessary changes to your phone line, and installing a BT "VDSL" modem. So we do need to book an engineer and we will need to find a suitable appointment time when you can be there to let him in.
What is BT Infinity?
Infinity is BT's brand image for their retail FTTC service. You can "only" get "Infinity" service from BT Retail. However, you can obtain FTTC from Wizards! It's the same sort of broadband, but we don't bundle it in with other services.
Can I still use my telephone line for calls?
Yes. As with ADSL, your telephone line remains a fully working line for making or receiving voice calls, fax, modem, or other such services continue to work as before. Such calls and the line rental will continue to be billed to you by the current supplier - though you can optionally move these services to us as well and take advantage of our excellent call rates, and free itemised billing!
Talk technical to me - how does this service work?
This is a new sort of broadband service called "VDSL". This stands for "Very High Bitrate Digital Line Subscriber". It's a "big brother" to the ADSL service broadband users have been using since around 1999. It gets much higher speeds than ADSL, but only works over much shorter cable runs. However, since the cable only goes from you to the street cabinet, not all the way to the exchange, that's just what we need! At the street cabinet the signal is converted from the VDSL connection from your modem to a signal carried on a high speed very reliable fibre-optic cable back to the exchange and from there to the rest of the internet.
At the moment you will need to use the BT supplied VDSL modem as your point of connection to the network. This modem presents an Ethernet port on the consumer side and can be connected to any device which supports PPPoE. This can be a single computer, or we can supply a wide range of routers and firewalls which are suitable. Your existing equipment may already be suitable!
How to Order
Call us! If you have an existing Wizards ADSL service, we can convert it. If you have ADSL from another ISP, we can import the account onto oru system and then convert it. If you have a phone line, we can add ADSL or FTTC service to it. If you don't have a phone line, we can order one for you!