How fast will FTTC run at?
Tuesday 10 April 2012 10:50:10 by Andrew Ferguson

With 12 years experience of how ADSL performs in the UK there is a wealth of guides to help people estimate what speed they will receive. The arrival of ADSL2+ changed the estimates, and it favoured those who lived within 3.5km of the exchange. Many claimed that Fibre to the Cabinet would not offer good speeds to many people, but the data available suggests that just under 90% of telephone lines that are connected to a street cabinet will receive 24 Mbps or faster. Compared to the current UK average this is a boost of around three times.

We have created the table below to try and help people understand what speed they may receive from fibre to the cabinet, compared to the real world figures that we published on Saturday the figures look low, that is because the source data was taking into account crosstalk which could potentially arise once FTTC services are very popular. This crosstalk is what vectoring should mitigate, but deployment of this is still a couple of years away.

For those in areas where FTTC is available, the telephone number look ups can give an estimate, but the table below allows people to assess how reasonable that estimate is, assuming you know where your street cabinet is located (out of the 85,000 or so Openreach has).

Not all telephone lines in the UK are connected to a cabinet, the vast majority are. In terms of superfast broadband solutions for those areas, we are still waiting on Openreach and the BDUK/local authority projects to announce their preferred solution. These exchange only lines are often the properties closest to the exchange, or new estates of 100 or properties squeezed onto an exchange years after all the original infrastructure was in place.