What Is FTTP?

FTTP stands for fibre to the premises: broadband delivered over optical fibre from the operator’s exchange right into the building, with no copper telephone wire anywhere in the line. In the UK it is marketed as full fibre. FTTH, fibre to the home, means the same thing for residential properties, and FTTP is the broader term that also covers offices, factories and other sites.

The alternative most people know is FTTC, fibre to the cabinet. With FTTC, fibre stops at a green street cabinet and the last stretch runs over the old copper telephone line, which limits speed and gets slower with distance. FTTP removes that copper entirely, typically using a passive optical network such as GPON or XGS-PON to share fibre between premises.

Because light in fibre does not weaken much over a few kilometres and is immune to electrical interference, FTTP can carry gigabit and faster services, often with the same upload speed as download.

An FTTP line has four main parts between the exchange and your devices.

The FTTx names describe where the fibre stops. The closer to the user, the faster and more consistent the service.

FTTC speeds fall as the copper run from the cabinet gets longer, so two houses on the same street can get very different results. FTTP speeds are set by the service tier, not the distance. Multi-gigabit tiers need equipment to match, covered in our multi-gig internet FAQ.

The fibre itself is rarely the limit. Its capacity is set by the optical equipment at each end, which operators can upgrade without digging up the street. Most UK and US full-fibre providers sell tiers from around 100 Mbps up to 1 Gbps on GPON, and an increasing number sell 2 Gbps and faster on XGS-PON, often with matching upload speeds. Because the capacity on each fibre is shared between the premises on one splitter, operators plan their networks so that peak-time speeds stay close to the tier sold. Inside the building, Wi-Fi coverage, router performance and Gigabit ports usually limit real speeds long before the fibre does.

Where the network is already built in the street, installing FTTP usually takes a single visit. An engineer runs a drop fibre from the nearest pole or underground chamber to a connection box on the outside wall, drills through to fit the ONT inside near a power socket, and tests the line. Where there is no spare duct or pole route, the operator may need civil works first, which takes longer, sometimes weeks or months. For business sites, the route, the ONT position and power for the ONT all need planning, especially where the comms room sits far from the point the fibre enters the building.

For a business, FTTP gives fast symmetrical uploads for cloud backup, video and remote access, and a service that does not degrade with distance from the cabinet. In the UK, the move from analogue phone lines to digital voice also means alarm lines, lift phones and telemetry that relied on copper need rethinking as sites move to fibre.

For operators, building FTTP is only half the job: each multi-gigabit tier has to be verified at the network edge. Test points need ports faster than Gigabit Ethernet and have to run unattended in cabinets. Our fibre verification case study shows an FTTH operator checking service from the cabinet with a 2.5GbE industrial mini PC.

We supply industrial computers with multi-gig ports set up as standard for remote test and monitoring on full-fibre networks. Send us your service tiers and cabinet conditions, and we will specify a system to match.