Collectively, the broadband industry often seems to confuse people with jargon and superlatives. You’ll often see terms like "speed" and "fast" used in various combinations to create a plethora of overlapping terms…..ultra-fast broadband…super-fast broadband….high speed broadband. And then there is the all those industry-invented abbreviations….NGA, FTTC, FTTP, 21CN.
So, when it comes to talking about our latest trials, we’re keeping it simple with "Fibre-Optic Broadband", which describes what we are actually going to trial over the coming months. Yes, it will deliver high speeds: up to 40 Mbps downstream with an assured minimum of 15 Mbps. And for uploading files, you can expect speeds of either 2 Mbps or 5 Mbps, a major improvement on current upstream speeds available on most ADSL packages.
So what are we doing? In network terms, we are moving the fibre-optic element of the network closer to your home. Normally, your broadband traffic travels over copper wire from your home to your local telephone exchange via a street-side cabinet (those ubiquitous green boxes you find on pavements around the country) and then onward via TalkTalk’s nationwide network to the Internet backbone.
Our fibre-optic broadband trial involves replacing that copper wire between the exchange and the green cabinets with a fibre-optic connection. That provides greater capacity to the exchange and therefore greater speed for each household. And it also allows us to move something called a DSLAM from the exchange to the cabinet. The DSLAM is where we collect internet traffic from multiple households and pass it on via TalkTalk’s network to the internet. Most people know that the further you are from the exchange, the slower your internet connection. It’s one of the fundamental limitations of DSL, the technology most ISPs use to deliver your broadband access. By moving the DSLAM to the cabinet, we are effectively bringing the exchange closer to you. This means higher speeds can be offered to more households on each cabinet.
In the next two weeks, TalkTalk is enabling its first fibre-optic broadband customers in Muswell Hill, North London. Initially, we’re aiming to prove the technology with a small group of staff and customers. But in October, we expect to extend the trial and invite more customers to join both in Muswell Hill and also in a second exchange area in Whitchurch, Cardiff. Trialists will get a new modem and a router and an engineer will visit their home to install a new telephone socket.
Keep an eye on our website (http://broadband.talktalk.co.uk/fibre-optic-trial) over the coming weeks and we will keep you updated with progress. If you live either of the two exchange areas, you will soon be able to register interest in participating in the trial via the website….and you could be amongst the first people in the UK to get TalkTalk’s fibre-optic broadband.
Postscript:
And what do those acronyms mean?
DSL – Digital Subscriber Line: a technology for bringing data to homes and businesses via ordinary copper telephone lines
DSLAM – Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer: a network device that receives signals from multiple customer DSL connections and puts the signals on a high-speed backbone
NGA – Next Generation Access: a catch-all phrase for broadband technologies delivering speeds in excess of standard ADSL or ADSL2+ (>24Mbps)
FTTC – Fibre-to-the-Cabinet: the industry term for the fibre-optic broadband service that TalkTalk will be trialling. Exactly as it says, it means extending fibre from the exchange to the green street-side cabinets
FTTP – Fibre-to-the-Premises: As FTTC but fibre is extended to the home or office. Speeds of 100Mbps are achievable but it is very expensive to implement. There is significant doubt in the UK whether customers need this speed and especially whether enough of them would pay to make it economic
Mbps – millions of bits per second or megabits per second and is a measure of bandwidth available at any given point in time
21CN – 21st Century Network: A BT term for upgrading its network to use IP technology. TalkTalk has already done this and its network is the largest fully IP-enabled network in the UK
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Martin
Anonymous