Fiber Optic Broadband

[pwdrive]

Just been informed that a fibre optic line will be brought to the pole outside our house in the near future, if we sign up for that connection what happens about the 'phone will that need the existing copper line to work? Maybe a dumb question but I know zilch about these things.

Lawrence.

[ppppenguin]

The commonest arrangement is "Fibre to the Cabinet" or FTTC. Then it's the existing copper phone line from the cabinet into your house. In your house it's no different to an ordinary phone line except you're getting fibre speed, depending on how far you are from the cabinet.

Much less common is "Fibre to the Premises" or FTTP. This will need a box at your house, supplied by Openreach, to terminate the fibre and split it to phone and internet ports. The box is mains powered and would normally have a backup battery so you can make phone calls if the mains fails. The big bonus of FTTP is guaranteed high speed, basically whatever you're willing to pay for.

[pwdrive]

Thanks Jeffery, from what they said it's going to be FTTP, the cabinet down in the village is already supplied by fibre, they will be putting in a fiber line from that cabinet all the way to the pole outside our kitchen, the fiber line will also serve other houses on its way, the fiber line will be terminated at the top of the pole outside our kitchen, if we decide to sign up they will then do a dropper from the pole to the outside wall of the house and then route it into the house.

Lawrence.

[Craig]

FTTP is pretty common in new-built houses now. Our son has this in the estate in Peterborough. I forget what speed he gets, but numbers from a Google search say initially 300Mbps imminently rising to 1Gbps. I suspect it is not cheap though because they will hit you with an installation cost.

[Terry]

Don't overlook Virgin Media's broadband in this discussion.

The fibre feed is only to the local area but, because the distribution network was designed for analogue TV, the quality is maintained throughout. Thus it doesn't matter if you are fed by the cabinet close to the fibre termination or from the most distant one, or even how far you are from the cabinet - everybody receives the same level of service, which starts with 50Mbs being the lowest on offer.

The only downside is that up-link speeds are lower than with other providers as the forward/reverse split is very asymmetrical which might be important to you. For most users, however, it won't be a problem.

[Crackle]

Our Virgin broadband arrives at the house on a twin cable, I believe one is a coaxial feed for TV and broadband and the other is ordinary twisted pairs for the phone. So in the event of a local power loss the phone still works.

[Terry]

That's right, Mike. That Gemini or figure of eight cable saves pulling two individual cables.

The telephony, incidentally, is only twisted pair for a short distance. If you see a pair of cabinets side by side, one larger than the other, the large one is where the fibre loop is connected back to the switch in the local hub or headend. There is a helluva lot of processing power in that cabinet!

There are also rechargeable batteries in that cabinet to maintain service in the event of a power failure.

Unlike the TV/broadband the telephony uses two fibre loops with the data circulating in opposite directions in each loop.

This provides a back-up in the event that someone digs up the fibre. If the signal in one direction stops, the data is automatically looped back to the other fibre with the same thing happening on the other side of the break, thus maintaining full service over the entire loop. If, on the other hand, the fault is in the adjacent cabinet, only service from that cabinet is affected. Alarms sent back to the switch warn of the problem but unaffected customers won't even know there is something wrong.