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Comment by Blackstone4 | Hacker News Reader

In the UK, the central network is fibre but the "last mile" from the exchange to home is always copper. The "last mile" can turn into 2+ miles if you're unlucky.

UK ISPs sell various different speeds including 'fibre' at the high end. However it's never true fibre and you'll have copper cable no matter the package you pick.

I had Plusnet 17MPS but in actual fact it was ~6MPS download and 0.5MPS upload. The bad part was if I did an upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed thereby slowing everything to a halt.

I tethered my phone to my laptop and got 16MPS upload speeds....

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As the other commenter said the move from ADSL to "fibre" meant that rather than being copper from your house to the exchange it's now copper from your house to the cabinet on a street nearby (hopefully) and fibre from there back to the exchange. The "last mile" of copper is now a lot, lot, shorter which is how they're able to run the faster speeds over it. Sure FTTC is not FTTP but it's dramatic improvement over ADSL/2

Absolutely, FTTC for us made using high-throughout Internet services feasible. We're not far from an exchange but the copper overhead cables pass several RF-noisy facilities and ADSL was constantly dropping-out. Even Andrews & Arnold couldn't do anything to improve it and we changed ISP after they lost interest ( no point paying their hefty charges for a flakey service ).

With the change to FTTC all that interference is gone and dropouts are very rare. FTTH doesn't really tempt us for any reasons.

There's a small number areas (but growing) of the UK with Fiber to the Home. Mostly Virgin (cable), but also new-build properties and areas serviced by niche providers like Hyperoptic, Gigaclear and Cityfibre. Actually, even BT sell Fiber to the Home in very select areas[1].

[1] https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/7676-bt-price-offers-now...

You are thinking of ADSL, which is limited to 24mpbs. BT does sell VDSL as fibre, but usually the distance of copper connection is only out to the street.

I think you're right. I spoke to the guys at Plusnet and they said it was fibre to the cabinet and no matter what package I picked it was copper to my house. With that in mind, I thought they were effectively limiting your bandwidth at the cabinet based on your package.

From the plusnet page: > Speeds are available as follows:

> Average download speeds of 36Mb† or 66Mb† for Fibre (FTTC) enabled areas depending on the package you choose > Average download speeds of 10MbΦ for ADSL2+ enabled areas

Adsl is a different beast indeed. It's physically limited because the frequency that it uses and the encoding that was possible or practical in the 90's can't carry more than 24. Vdsl is indeed throttled at the edge router into two products, basically the lower frequency components provide the lower speed product and propagate better over longer lines.

I live in the UK and have fttp from BT, there's an optical terminator in my looking room.

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