FTTH

"Fibre To The Home"also known as FTTH is Fibre Optic cable being installed from the telephone exchange to the Home and is used to deliver communications such as broadband, digital TV and telephone.

Fibre Optic Cable can be installed to replace existing copper wire which is what was/is used to originally transfer data from the telephone exchange to the home.

Fibre Optic cable is able to offer much faster speeds than copper wire and much more bandwidth than copper wires are able to cope with which is why Fibre Broadband is the future to next generation broadband.

Copper wires currently installed in the UK are only able to offer broadband speeds up to a maximum of 24MB with ADSL2+ technology (currently being installed by companies such as BE Broadband). Fibre Optic allows broadband speeds of around 100Mb, in the UK Virgin Media are the cable broadband provider and can offer a broadband speed of 50Mb.

When cable is not laid to the Home there is also the option of FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) which costs less than FTTH.

The negative factor with regards to installing FTTH is the costs. For FTTH to be installed across the UK an estimate of around £10-£15 billion is expected.

The BT fibre optic network will offer Fibre To The House/Premises (FTTH or FTTP) but this is only being done for a small number of places with the majority getting FTTC installed. BT Infinity (the name for the fibre broadband network) should be available to 10 million UK homes by The 2012 Olympics.