Those days are long gone, using a traditional copper phone line to connect to the internet is about as old school as lumpy pink custard. You don't have to be a techie to appreciate the benefits of a full-fibre connection. If you're interested to know how it works, we've created a super simple guide for you below.
Broadband is like a pipe connecting your house to the internet. Sometimes the pipe is shared with other homes via a green cabinet in the street.
The more stuff you stream and download, the more quickly that pipe fills up. And if you have loads of devices or people using the connection, the pipe starts to get fuller and fuller until it slows down for everyone.
With old school broadband, the pipe is made of ancient copper telephone wires. Back in the day, this was fine (so long as it was working). But download speeds were slow (which was just about ok, if you were only browsing Myspace).
As the internet grew in popularity, and the websites and content we wanted demanded more, copper became less reliable, things slowed even more and we began to experience the buffer wheel of doom.
Broadband speeds got a bit of a boost with the introduction of fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) broadband. The part of the pipe between the cabinet and the internet was replaced with fibre optic cables, which allow for faster speeds than copper. You could fit more ‘stuff’ into the pipe and data travelled more quickly.
But the copper to your house wasn’t upgraded – and the further away from the green cabinet you were, the speed would start to drop (so you could receive slower speeds than your neighbours!). As there was still some copper wire between you and the internet, the connection could still be flaky, unreliable and grind to a halt at certain times of the day.
And as our homes get smarter, we have to share our connections with even more devices. TVs, smartphones, doorbells, thermostats – they all start to fill the pipe, leaving less for when we want to use the internet.
Lit Fibre unleashes the full potential of the internet by replacing the whole pipe with fibre optic cabling. It’s also known as fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) because it really is full-fibre, all the way.
Where copper cable relies on electrical signals to send and receive data, fibre uses lasers, transmitting at the speed of light. Which is why an ultrafast full-fibre broadband connection can provide symmetrical speeds of up to 1Gb (1,000Mb).
That’s the difference of taking 4 hours to download a game to a matter of minutes. That’s a big enough pipe for everyone in your house to do everything. At the same time.
In fact, Lit Fibre provides speeds that are up to 12.9x faster* than the UK average – and 5x more reliable too**. And best of all, we have an ultrafast package for everyone.
*Broadband speed calculations: The UK’s average broadband speeds are 69.4Mbps for downloads compared to Lit Fibre’s top package average speed of 900Mps. Average speeds taken from Ofcom’s ‘UK Home Broadband Performance’ report March 2023.
**Ofcom, Building a Full Fibre Future report, 2018