Full fibre vs FTTC: the honest comparison for UK homes and small businesses

If you're paying for "fibre broadband" today in the UK, there's roughly a 50/50 chance you actually have copper running into your home. That single fact is what full fibre vs FTTC is really about. FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) uses fibre to the green street cabinet and copper the rest of the way. FTTP (fibre to the premises), the proper name for full fibre, runs fibre all the way to the wall plate inside your house, with no copper anywhere.

This guide is written for two audiences. UK households trying to work out whether the upgrade is worth it, and small business owners or hybrid workers weighing connectivity against cost. Both are looking at the same two technologies, but the trade-offs differ once you go past the basics. We cover real-world speeds, upload and latency, weather and reliability, cost, the 2027 PSTN switch-off that ends FTTC for good, how to check what you have, and a quick verdict for each audience.

What FTTC actually is, and why the copper bit is the bottleneck

FTTC stands for fibre to the cabinet. Openreach (the engineering arm that owns most of the UK's broadband network) runs fibre from the local exchange to the green cabinet you walk past on your street. From that cabinet to your house, the signal travels down the same copper line that has carried your phone calls for decades.

That copper is the problem. Copper degrades signal over distance and is sensitive to moisture, joint corrosion, and electrical interference. The further your property sits from the cabinet, the slower the connection. As a rough engineering guide, you might get around 70 Mbps at 300 metres, 40 Mbps at 800 metres, and under 20 Mbps beyond 1.5 kilometres, though actual performance varies line by line. Two houses on the same street can have very different FTTC speeds for no reason other than the length of copper between them and the box.

The label is the other issue. Most providers sell FTTC as "fibre broadband" because part of the journey is fibre, which is technically true and practically misleading. If nobody has drilled a new fibre cable into your house, you've FTTC, not full fibre.

What full fibre (FTTP) is, and the no-copper claim

Full fibre, or FTTP (fibre to the premises), runs a single strand of glass fibre all the way from the exchange to a small box on the inside wall of your home, called an ONT (Optical Network Terminal). Your router plugs into the ONT. There's no copper involved at any stage. Your data travels as pulses of light through glass, which is why the engineering is so different.

The practical consequence is that speed no longer depends on how far you live from the cabinet. A house 200 metres from the cabinet and a house 2 kilometres from it get the same full fibre performance, assuming both have FTTP available. Distance stops mattering.

This is the same technology behind business leased lines, though leased lines add dedicated bandwidth and a hard uptime SLA on top. The cable in the ground is fundamentally similar. If you want a deeper walkthrough of how full fibre works end to end, the what is full fibre guide covers install day, the PSTN switch-off, and coverage in more detail.

The speed difference, with actual numbers

FTTC tops out at around 80 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload, and that's the best-case figure. Real-world FTTC speeds sit lower than the advertised maximum for most users, often by 20 to 40%, because of line length, internal wiring and the age of the cabinet.

Full fibre starts where FTTC ends. Openreach FTTP plans currently range from 100 Mbps up to 1.6 Gbps, per Openreach's published wholesale tiers. Virgin Media's nexfibre network advertises a 2 Gbps tier in some urban postcodes. According to Ofcom's Connected Nations reporting, average UK fixed broadband speeds have continued to rise as full fibre coverage expands, with FTTP now passing the majority of UK premises.

In practice, a 900 Mbps full fibre plan delivers something like 700 to 850 Mbps over Wi-Fi to a modern device near the router. The rest is lost to Wi-Fi interference, peak-hour congestion, router age and the number of devices on the network at once. Even at the bottom of that range you've roughly 10 times the speed of a typical FTTC line.

Most households don't need gigabit. A 300 to 500 Mbps full fibre line covers a busy family home comfortably. The point is the floor, not the ceiling.

Upload speeds and latency: where FTTC really shows its age

Download speed gets the headlines. Upload speed and latency are where FTTC quietly falls apart for modern use.

FTTC caps upload at around 20 Mbps under Openreach's published VDSL2 profile, and most users get 8 to 15 Mbps in practice. That's fine for sending email. It's uncomfortable for two people on simultaneous Teams calls (Microsoft's published Teams guidance recommends at least 1.5 Mbps each way per HD video participant), awkward for cloud backups, and frustrating for anyone uploading video, large CAD files or photo sets. Full fibre plans typically offer symmetric or near-symmetric upload, so a 500 Mbps download plan often comes with 500 Mbps upload.

Latency is the other gap. FTTC ping typically sits around 30 to 60 ms on a good day (see Ofcom UK home broadband performance research), sometimes higher. Full fibre is usually under 5 ms. That five-fold to ten-fold drop is the difference between video calls that stutter and video calls that don't, between online gaming that feels responsive and gaming that feels delayed, and between smart home devices that react instantly and ones that lag.

If you work from home, run a small business that depends on cloud tools, game competitively, or have a house full of smart devices, the upload and latency gap matters more than the headline download number.

Reliability and weather: copper degrades, fibre doesn't

FTTC is exposed to weather in a way most people only notice once they've lived through a bad winter. Rain seeps into copper joints. Cold cracks the insulation on older lines. Lightning induces surges that can knock out cabinets entirely. Openreach engineers spend a significant share of their workload chasing copper faults that come and go with the seasons.

Full fibre is glass inside a protective sheath. It isn't affected by moisture, electrical interference or temperature swings in the same way. The physical line failure rate on FTTP is materially lower than on copper, which is one reason providers can offer better SLAs on full fibre business products.

If your FTTC line drops to half speed every time it rains, or you have a recurring fault that Openreach "fixes" three times a year, the line itself is most likely the cause. Full fibre removes that variable.

Cost: headline price vs the price you actually pay

The assumption is that full fibre costs more. In 2026, total cost over a contract usually evens out, and sometimes the full fibre line works out lower over the contract. The reason is what happens after the headline price.

UK broadband pricing has two layers. The headline (the figure on the advert) and the actual monthly cost over the life of your contract. The big six providers raised consumer broadband prices by roughly £3 to £4 a month in their April 2026 annual review (multiple UK press reports), and most of them apply the same kind of rise every year. A line that looked like a £29 deal on day one can sit closer to £36 by the end of a two-year contract.

Inspire Telecom doesn't raise prices mid-contract. The monthly price you sign at is the monthly price you pay for the full term, with no annual review and no inflation-linked clause. Inspire's residential range runs from Inspire Ultra 80 (80 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up) up to Inspire Ultra 1000 (gigabit). Current pricing is on the broadband page and the line for each tier stays fixed for the contract length.

The honest comparison is total spend over the contract, not the first month. A fixed £35 a month over a typical two-year contract is £840. A headline £29 that rises annually can work out to £790 to £870 over the same period depending on the rises. The headline difference is smaller than it looks, and the predictability is worth more to a household budget than a sub-£30 starting price that drifts upward without notice.

The 2027 PSTN switch-off: FTTC has a deadline

This is the part most FTTC customers haven't been told plainly. The PSTN (the public switched telephone network, the copper phone system) is being switched off on 31st January 2027, per Openreach and Ofcom communications on the all-IP migration. When the PSTN goes, so does every service that depends on it. That includes traditional landlines, ADSL, and FTTC, because FTTC uses the same copper infrastructure for the last leg into your home.

This isn't optional and it isn't Inspire policy. It's Openreach retiring the underlying network, and every UK provider has to migrate customers off it by the deadline. If you're on FTTC in late 2026, your provider will move you onto a digital alternative before the cutoff. For most addresses with FTTP available, that alternative is full fibre. For addresses without FTTP, it's usually 4G or 5G home broadband.

The practical takeaway is that FTTC has roughly nine months of useful life left. Switching now, on your own timing, is calmer than being migrated in a queue with millions of other households in the final weeks. It also means your phone, alarm, care pendant and any other connected devices get tested in advance, rather than discovered to be incompatible the week of the switch.

How to check which one you currently have

You can usually tell at a glance. If your broadband runs through the same wall socket as your home phone (the master socket, often a small white box with a phone port and a broadband filter), you're almost certainly on FTTC or older ADSL. If you have a separate small white box on the inside wall labelled ONT, with a fibre cable running to it and a short Ethernet cable to your router, you've full fibre.

The router itself isn't a reliable indicator. Most providers ship the same router shape to FTTC and FTTP customers.

A postcode check confirms it in under a minute. Run your address through the Inspire availability checker on the broadband page and it will tell you which technologies your address can get today, including whether FTTP has arrived on your street. If FTTP is listed, you can switch to full fibre.

The verdict, by household and by business

For most UK households, the question is no longer whether to leave FTTC, it's when. Openreach's exchange-by-exchange stop-sell programme means new FTTC orders are already unavailable across large parts of the country, and the PSTN switch-off on 31st January 2027 ends FTTC service entirely. If FTTP is available at your address, the upgrade pays for itself in fewer call drops, faster uploads, a less fragile line and a contract that doesn't need redoing in 2027 on someone else's timetable. Moving when you choose is calmer than being migrated in a queue with millions of other households in the final weeks. Residential plans on the Inspire broadband page.

For small business and home-office workers, the calculus is firmer. FTTC upload speeds make all-day Teams calls, cloud backups and hosted phone systems an uncomfortable experience. Full fibre fixes that for not much more money. If the connection is genuinely business-critical (ecommerce, call centre, customer-facing services), look at business broadband or step up to a leased line for the uptime SLA. The leased line costs more, but the value is the guarantee, not the speed.

For renters or addresses without FTTP, 4G or 5G home broadband is the practical bridge. No engineer, no drilling, no landlord permission, and 50 to 300 Mbps in most areas. It also continues to work after the PSTN switch-off in 2027.

Switching is faster than most people remember. Since September 2024, the UK's One Touch Switch process (introduced by Ofcom in September 2024) means you only contact the new provider and the rest is automatic, with most switches completing within a couple of weeks.

Frequently asked questions