I’ve lost count of the number of times we quote Fibre Leased Lines and we have this sort of conversation with clients:

“A 100Mb Fibre Line will be £500 per month”
“No, BT have already told me that fibre isn’t available in my area”
“You’re in London EC1, the checkers do suggest fibre is readily available”
“I phoned BT yesterday and they told me that fibre should be available in the next 2 years, but until then I’d have to put up with ADSL..?”
“Ahh…..”

You see, our friends at BT, TalkTalk and Sky have muddied the business waters a little over the last few months. “Superfast Broadband”, yes, I can accept that . “Superfast Fibre Broadband” is slightly more troublesome.

BT Infinity (and however their competitors brand it) is an excellent home user product, great for downloading movies and letting  the whole family have access to a decent amount of broadband bandwidth.

But it’s not fibre!

So what is it?

The wholesale product description of Infinity is “Fibre To The Cabinet”, or FTTC for short.

This is exactly what it sounds like. BT use the green street cabinets to terminate telephone lines (if you have a BT engineer visit he’ll normally tinker about in your area’s green cabinet at some point), and the cabinet (you can probably guess this bit) is where they bring the FTTC Fibre to.

Essentially, BT’s project is to bring a dedicated fibre leased line to every green street cabinet in the UK.

BUT… From the green cabinet your superfast broadband still runs down your single copper phone line into your premises. Doesn’t matter if you’re a business or a residential user, your Superfast Fibre Broadband still runs into your premises through your phone line, with all the fragilities associated with sharing an internet service with your telephone line.

So, going back to our prospective customer in EC1 above, you can get fibre, in fact fibre may well be running under the pavement outside your building, at 1:1 Contention and with speeds of 1000Mb down and up if you need them.

What you might not be able to get is “superfast fibre broadband”, but, as a serious business owner who needs guaranteed service, you don’t want that anyway, do you?