Full Fibre Broadband Deals

The broadband industry spent years selling "fibre" that was mostly copper, because the advertising rules let part-fibre lines wear the same label as the real thing. A 67Mbps line and a 900Mbps line were both, officially, "fibre", and the reader was left to work out the difference from the price.

Here is the actual difference. Fibre deals in the broad sense cover FTTC, where glass reaches a street cabinet and copper carries the signal the last stretch, fading as it goes and topping out around 80Mbps. Full fibre, FTTP, removes the copper entirely. Light carries your data the whole way, so distance stops mattering, two neighbours get the same speed and peak time is just another hour of the day. If FTTP has not reached your address yet, those part-copper lines are still worth comparing properly, because a well-priced FTTC deal beats an overpriced one while you wait for the build to arrive.

Virgin Media sits in a third category. Its network is mostly cable, hybrid fibre-coax rather than glass to the door. It delivers gigabit downloads across its whole footprint, but uploads are far lower. Virgin is upgrading its cable areas to full fibre too: around 9 million premises, counting the nexfibre build, already have it. Each of these connection types behaves differently when the household actually leans on it, and the differences show up in the evening, not in the advert.

Adverts sell downloads. Upload is where full fibre quietly earns its keep, and not all FTTP uploads are equal.

On many altnet networks, upload matches download. Hyperoptic, Community Fibre and most providers selling over CityFibre offer symmetric plans: buy 500Mbps and you send at 500Mbps too. On Openreach-based full fibre, which is what BT, Sky, EE, Vodafone, TalkTalk and Plusnet mostly sell, upload is lower, typically around 110Mbps on a 900Mbps plan.

That asymmetry sounds like a catch, but keep it in perspective. Part-copper fibre maxes out at 20Mbps up, so a 900Mbps Openreach line uploads about five times faster. For the household with one person on video calls all day, another backing up a phone's photo library and a teenager livestreaming from the bedroom, upload is often a better reason to switch than download. A symmetric altnet line is simply the strongest version of that argument.

The temptation with full fibre is to grab the biggest number. Resist it. Knowing what speed you actually need will save you more than any introductory discount, because most homes are comfortably served well below the top tier.

If you do want the top end, gigabit deals start at 1Gbps and go well past 2Gbps on some networks. The teenager will not notice the difference between 500Mbps and a gigabit. The bank account will.

Full fibre has gone from niche to mainstream fast. Openreach's network passes more than 23 million premises and is on track for 25 million by the end of 2026, part of an up to £15bn build. Add the altnets and Virgin, and around 8 in 10 UK homes can now get full fibre, according to Ofcom.

The catch is that coverage is patchy street by street. One road gets three networks and the next gets none. No national percentage tells you which road is yours. Availability at your exact address is the only number that matters, so check your postcode to see which of these deals reach your home.

The altnets deserve a serious look while you are here. Their networks are newer, built full-fibre from the ground up, and they often beat the big names on upload and price. Some still fix the price for the whole contract, though that is no longer universal (Hyperoptic dropped its no-rise promise in 2025), so check the terms. Under Ofcom's rules, any rise on a contract signed since January 2025 must be shown in pounds and pence before you sign.

There is a deadline worth knowing about. BT's old analogue phone network closes by 31 January 2027, and landline calls move onto broadband. Part-copper broadband carries on after that, but Openreach will retire its copper lines over the years after full fibre reaches each area. Full fibre has no copper to retire, so moving now gets you ahead of a change that is coming to most of the country anyway.

The list starts with best value: the deals that cost least over the first year once intro prices, setup fees and gifts are counted. You can also sort by the cheapest monthly price or the fastest speed.