FTTH: an acronym to remember
We've all got used to the ADSL acronym, and even though few of us can remember it stands for "Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line", we do know it roughly means "Broadband". Now is the time to note a new acronym, FTTH, which stands for Fibre To The Home, and for business users, FTTP, Fibre To The Premises.
If your broadband connection is an ADSL line then it comes into your home or office using your copper phone cable across the BT network. Just 20 years ago, phone engineers would say that telephone cable and modems would never reliably support more than 12Kb communication rates, which was revised upwards to 24Kb, then 33.6Kb and finally plateaued out at 56Kb. The jump to ADSL required a radically different way of approaching the problem, but with it we can now achieve speeds of 2Mb up to 24Mb using that same copper phone cable.
However, with ADSL, the speed you can achieve is severely limited by distance from the BT exchanges. To get consistent high speed over distance we need other technologies such as fibre-optics. Fibre is an expensive technology compared to copper, and requires more sophisticated "modems" to interface the signal to the PC, but it is easily capable of delivering speeds of 100Mb and more.
BT had previously committed to delivering 1.5 million FTTP installations on building projects where the costs of laying fibre would be low but has recently announced that it now plans to go far beyond that. It plans to run fibre to 2.5 million premises by 2012 and use fibre links to 7.5 million of its street cabinets, (FTTC), which can then deliver data using ADSL over the relatively short distances from cabinet to home, bringing ADSL speeds of up to 40Mb within reach of many homes and small businesses. It still isn't fibre to the home, but it is a significant improvement.
BT has not yet announced which areas will benefit from its fibre project but has indicated that it will focus on urban areas where it is most likely to show a profit on the venture. This means that rural areas, already struggling to get any sort of broadband supply, will find the digital divide just grows wider. Fortunately, cable operator Virgin Media has said that it is interested in expanding its network into rural areas and has begun a trial partnership project in Cornwall.
28th October 2009
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.