Full fibre broadband,explained.
What it actually is, how it gets to your house, and why every UK line will be on it by 2027.
Plain-English guide — no marketing gloss. Fibre from your ISP to your wall, no copper anywhere in the chain, symmetric upload + download, and the PSTN switch-off that means every remaining copper line has to migrate anyway.
No coverage yet? Mid-contract elsewhere? Join the waitlist or set a contract-end reminder — we'll ping you when it's the right moment to switch.
Postcode-check confirms which full-fibre network your address is actually on.
Fibre the whole way.
'Full fibre' means the fibre-optic cable runs the entire way from your ISP to your house — no copper wire anywhere in the chain. The industry name is FTTP (Fibre To The Premises). Every other 'fibre broadband' in the UK is a hybrid with copper somewhere in it.
All copper
Fibre only reaches the local exchange. From the exchange to your house it's copper phone wire — the same lines BT ran in the 1970s. Caps at ~24 Mbps, worse the further you live from the exchange.
Fibre + copper
Fibre reaches the green cabinet at the end of your street; copper handles the last few hundred metres to your house. Called 'Superfast' or 'fibre broadband' by legacy ISPs. Caps at ~80 Mbps.
Full fibre
Fibre runs from the ISP core network all the way to a box on your wall (the ONT). No copper anywhere. Symmetric upload + download, immune to line-length degradation, gigabit and multi-gig capable.
Copper, hybrid, or full fibre.
The UK has three flavours of broadband connection. They look the same from the router on your sideboard, but the wire behind the wall makes a real difference — to speed, to reliability, and to whether you'll be on it in 2028.
ADSL / SoGEA
Copper phone-line tech. The signal runs over the same wire that carried voice calls in the 90s — physics caps it at around 24 Mbps if you're right next to the exchange, less if you're further away.
- Available almost everywhere
- Cheapest tier on offer
- Speed drops the further you are from the exchange
- Sensitive to weather, line noise, dodgy wiring
- Being switched off by Dec 2027 (BT's PSTN retirement)
Mostly rural / hard-to-reach addresses. If you're still on this in a town in 2026, you can almost certainly upgrade.
FTTC
Most UK households today. Fibre runs from the exchange to a green street cabinet at the end of your road; copper runs from the cabinet into your house. Distance from the cabinet decides your real-world speed.
- Available almost everywhere
- Up to 80 Mbps possible (close to the cabinet)
- Cheap, stable, well understood
- Last-leg copper still degrades with distance
- Real-world speed often 30–55 Mbps, not the headline 80
- Being switched off by Dec 2027 — every line moves to full fibre eventually
~60% of UK households as of 2026. The default unless you've actively upgraded.
FTTP
Glass fibre runs all the way from the exchange into your house. No copper, no cabinet bottleneck, no distance penalty. The headline speed is the real-world speed.
- Up to 8 Gbps where the network supports it
- Identical speeds at midnight or 8pm — no contention drop
- No degradation over distance
- Symmetric upload available (rare on FTTC)
- Future-proof — this is the network everyone else is migrating to
- Still rolling out — 75–85% UK coverage as of 2026
- Per-property install required (we handle it)
Anyone on this page who can have it. If your postcode supports FTTP, there's no reason to be on anything else.
Speeds quoted are typical for residential lines · individual line conditions vary · drop your postcode to see what's actually available
of UK homes now covered by full-fibre-capable networks.
Openreach FTTP alone reaches most of the country; altnet overbuild adds more choice in the metros. Postcode-check tells you exactly what's live at your address.
From street cabinet to router.
Four physical steps between the fibre in your road and Wi-Fi on your phone. Once the network's in your street, install is a half-day appointment — no digging your garden up, no BT engineer waiting for you all day.
Fibre reaches your street
A wholesale network (Openreach, CityFibre, Netomnia, or a regional altnet) has already built the fibre spine along your road. This bit's usually invisible to you — it happens years before you order.
Engineer runs fibre to the wall
On install day the engineer runs a small fibre cable from the street chamber to the outside of your house, then through the wall to wherever you want the router. Half-day AM or PM appointment.
ONT terminates the fibre
The fibre plugs into a small white box on the wall — an Optical Network Terminal. This is where the light-based signal converts to Ethernet. Provided free with the install.
Router plugs into the ONT
One Ethernet cable from the ONT to your router's WAN port. The router hands out Wi-Fi and wired connections to everything in your house. Ships pre-configured — plug in and go.
The router that arrives in the box is picked by tier — the /routers page has the full spec sheets.
Upload is half the story.
Every legacy connection — ADSL, FTTC, cable — was designed around the assumption that you download way more than you upload. Full fibre delivers both equally, which changes what's actually possible day to day.
Working from home
Video calls need bandwidth in BOTH directions. Zoom / Teams / Meet on asymmetric broadband (fast down, slow up) means everyone else sees you pixelated even when your download speed is fine.
Backing up + syncing
Cloud backup (iCloud / Google Photos / Dropbox / Backblaze) pushes gigabytes UP the line, not down. Asymmetric copper broadband makes an overnight backup take a week; symmetric fibre finishes it in an hour.
Streaming / creating
Twitch, YouTube live, OBS, video-heavy content creation all consume upload bandwidth. Full fibre's symmetric upload is the difference between a stable 1080p stream and one that keeps dropping to 480p.
Illustrative for a 1 Gbps FTTP tier vs typical FTTC. Actual speeds subject to line + tier.
The networks lighting UK streets.
Giant is a retailer — we don't own fibre in the ground. We buy wholesale from every UK network we can (there are more than most people realise) and pick the right one for your postcode. Multi-network by design.
Every UK line moves to fibre by 2027.
BT is switching off the copper PSTN by 2027. Every ADSL, FTTC, and copper home phone in the country migrates to fibre + digital voice before then — you can choose your provider now, or be moved by whoever holds your line at the deadline.
Full fibre, answered.
Ready to see what's live at your address?
Postcode-check confirms which networks reach you, the top speed we can deliver, and how long install takes.
No coverage yet? Mid-contract elsewhere? Join the waitlist or set a contract-end reminder — we'll ping you when it's the right moment to switch.