It’s been a long time coming but there is finally an affordable way to get ultrafast broadband over BT Openreach’s fibre infrastructure. Cerberus are very proud to offer businesses FTTP services and G.Fast services at up to 330Mbps for reasonable prices.
To date, FTTP has been a theoretical promising technology, but its potential has always been at arms length due to the hefty prices for the faster products. If you could get 80Mbps Business FTTC for around £30-£40 a month, how could it make sense to pay hundreds of pounds a month for FTTP at 330Mbps. You could argue that you are paying a similar amount per Mbps, but that misses the point that SMEs just don’t have that money to spend on their Internet connection, so it’s just a non-starter. And trying to squeeze down the prices by limited bandwidth usage is self-evidently daft for a 330Mbps service. No point having that speed if you then have to ration usage.
So Cerberus is now introducing ultrafast FTTP and G.Fast products at 160Mbps up to 330Mbps at genuinely affordable prices (even the fastest services retail at just £87.50 and £75.00 per month respectively). In fact, during an introductory period, 330/20Mbps FTTP is just £67.50 a month, 220Mbps is £55.00 a month and 160Mbps is just £45.00 a month. And remember, with an FTTP service you don’t need to pay £10-15 a month for a phone line. This could be something of a game changer for take up of these services. In sub-£100 territory, SMEs can genuinely afford these services and if they can make use of the speed, they will provide a huge boost to productivity, remote working possibilities and opportunities to capitalise on cloud services that have been just not been open to them due to bandwidth constraints.
Now as everyone knows, the roll-out of FTTP is somewhat limited but it is getting better. BT Openreach have concentrated on deploying it in new build residential and office projects. Right now they have it in about 450,000 premises which is not bad considering it was 350,000 last year. They are gradually ramping up deployment and aim to be in 2 million premises by 2020. But it begs the question, what if I am not one of the lucky few?
That is where G.Fast comes in. G.Fast is a variant of FTTC which runs at higher speeds over copper – in trials up to 330Mbps down and 50Mbps up. Sounds good right? Well yes, G.Fast is really good but it’s important to understand the relative benefits and limitations of G.Fast vs FTTP as they are not the same.
The main feather in G.Fast’s cap is ease of deployment and therefore future availability. It can be run over existing copper with broadly the same kit and infrastructure as BT have been using for plain FTTC. That means, once they have got the technology tested and understood fully, Openreach can theoretically roll out to all their FTTC-enabled cabs relatively quickly. There is no more fibre to lay so it’s a relatively easy process to upgrade a cab from FTTC to G.Fast. Their published target is to reach 10 million premises by 2020, 5 time more than FTTP.
However, note the limitations. And these are only in relation to a pure-fibre FTTP service, so it’s not doom and gloom here, just points to remember. G.Fast speeds are distance dependent. That is, the further you are from your cab, the slower it goes. And the fall-off is steeper than with FTTC, so on lines that get mid-speed FTTC like 60Mbps, expect to get 220-250Mbps of the max 330Mbps possible using G.Fast. But on lines that run FTTC at 20Mbps, you won’t get G.Fast at all… So, while G.Fast will be in lots of cabs, large fractions of lines served by that cab won’t be getting G.Fast. Contrast that against FTTP where you can be miles from the cab, and you will still get 330Mbps. Light in a fibre is not as fussy as electrical signals in a piece of 40 year old poorly-insulated copper.
And the other consequence of running over copper, even for a short distance, is reliability. FTTC is a country mile more reliable than ADSL due to the relatively short copper run, but if there is some horrible electrical interference in your premises, on a duct or at a copper joint, there is still scope for your FTTC to be flakey. The same goes for G.Fast. Now BT Openreach have spent a lot of time in their trials dealing with this and are doing clever things like co-opting as much of the frequency range they can possibly use to make the service stable, so it’s not like it will be any worse than FTTC, but in this respect again, FTTP remains the gold standard.
But in favour of G.Fast again, it is cheaper to deploy and maintain than FTTP and that is reflected in the costs. For trial customers, Cerberus is offering 330/50Mbps G.Fast for a standard price of £75 a month.
However, there is one other thing to note. In a sense, all of this comparison of FTTP vs G.Fast is moot. BT Openreach do not deploy FTTC/G.Fast and FTTP in the same cabs. Why would they, right? But the good news is that 330Mbps broadband, in one form or another, is coming to a cabinet near you, and now you can afford it.
In fact it might already be there. Aren’t you curious to check? Go Ahead!
For more information on the Cerberus range of ultrafast broadband products, and to place an order, click here. To contact our Sales Team, call us on 0345 257 1333, or email sales@cerberusnetworks.co.uk