Can I get full fibre broadband? Your questions answered
I can’t get full fibre. What now?
This might be because you live in a rural or remote location. Network providers have been quicker to invest in full fibre infrastructure within cities and busy towns. Don’t despair though, there are several altnets (smaller, alternative network providers) that are hard at work to narrow this divide. Gigaclear is a great option to try as you can register your interest and this can help with a quicker rollout.
The UK government has been working with broadband suppliers to achieve at least 85% gigabit coverage of the UK by 2025, and then nationwide coverage by 2030.
If you can’t get ‘full fibre’, you probably can get ‘partial fibre’ as 97% of UK premises currently have this connection available to them. Confused? We’ll help explain below.
What is partial-fibre (or FTTC) broadband?
Most connections that are referred to as ‘fibre broadband’ should more accurately be thought of as ‘partial fibre’. This offers faster speeds than standard broadband, but slower speeds than full fibre.
Like standard broadband, it still connects from the street cabinets, hence the name ‘fibre-to-the-cabinet’ (FTTC). But, it’s faster, because instead of running through the older, copper cables from the broadband exchange, the fibre network uses its own new fibre-optic cables.
However, the network from street cabinet to your property, is still a copper phoneline, which means the absolute maximum speed that can be reached is 80Mbps. If you see any package advertising speeds between 30Mbps and 80Mbps, it’s likely that this will be through a partial fibre connection.
What exactly is full fibre?
We’ve already revealed that full fibre is the fastest broadband available. It’s known as Ultrafast Fibre and can give you speeds of between 100 and 1000Mbps. That’s 30 times faster than standard broadband. Issues like buffering and outages will become a thing of the past with full fibre.
This technology relies entirely on fibre optic cables that run from the broadband exchange to your property, which is also why they can be known as ‘fibre to the premises’ (FTTP). It is future-proofing businesses and homes because, once installed, there won’t be the need to invest in new broadband cables for decades.
Do I actually need full fibre?
Full fibre gives you ultrafast speeds of between 100Mbps - 1Gbps.
Do you need these? As a basic rule, you’ll need at least 10Mbps per broadband user. Although this should be doubled for any users who are gaming or streaming 4K content.
We’ve broken it down into the below so you can have a decent idea of what you should be shopping around for.
However, even if the maths is saying that you need around 60Mbps, it still might be worth in looking at more. With the competitive pricing, you might even not be paying much more for these significantly greater speeds.
Also, think future-proofing. With the quality of TV shows and video games improving, smart home devices expanding and hybrid home working on the rise, the need for more bandwidth will only get greater. So if the price is right, full fibre would always make a sensible choice if available.
Compare the latest full-fibre broadband offers