Originally written by Partner Content on Small Business
The UK government defines superfast broadband as 24Mb/sec.
What’s more, that definition is an average speed, so your ‘superfast broadband’ could be running at 5-8Mb/sec for much of the day.
Is fibre the answer?
That depends on the fibre connection we are talking about. Domestic fibre connections are definitely not the answer.
FTTC
Fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) connections are better than ADSL copper wiring, but they don’t have the capacity because the connection is shared between fifty premises. An additional issue with FTTC connections is the final few hundred metres of copper cable; a material that is fundamentally unsuited to carrying massive amounts of data.
FTTH
Fibre to the home (FTTH) connections are better than FTTC, but your internet connection is still shared with fifty households, so you will never get the maximum speed out of the fibre.
Contention ratio
This high contention ratio was a way to roll out fibre connections quickly but means that everyone on a domestic optical fibre connection gets less than the quoted speed for much of the time. The overcrowding problem is getting worse every year.
When fibre first started rolling out in the 1990s the only demands on it were from personal computers. Thirty years