True fibre to the home

I have already banged the drum about the likes of BT and Virgin selling their broadband products as ‘fibre to the home’, when the cable coming into the home, is in fact copper. And I asked the question then what will happen when they do actually start shifting fibre to the home – how will they differentiate it from what they tell the public today?

Well that day is nearly upon them, but in the meantime there have been companies plodding along and for the last five years at least, have been installing fibre into homes all across the country. My brother has just completed on a new flat in the new development taking place in Canada Water (London) and was pleasantly surprised to find an odd box in his airing cupboard with a piece of fibre in it. Low and behold he is the beneficiary of some forward thinking housing developers and now has the choice of broadband from 50 Mb/s through to a potential 1 Gb/s (1000 Mb/s).

You can see the box in the picture which is just awaiting the router which fits inside it and then connects to the ports at the top to distribute the signal around the flat. Being a true fibre installation SKY satellite feeds and telephone are all provisioned over the fibre, simplifying the housing developers build.

So this is the future that will apparently cost in excess of £30 bn to rollout across the country but would deal with our long-term needs for faster speeds. As for my brother, he won’t have to wait, and I will be interested to see what he actually uses it for and if the increase in speed is something he wants/needs.