FTTP, FTTC, cable and 5G: broadband types explained

FTTP stands for fibre to the premises, and it means exactly that: a fibre-optic line runs the whole way from the exchange to a small box on your wall, with no copper anywhere in the chain. Light carries your data the entire distance, which is why it does not fade and does not care how far you live from the street cabinet.

This is the fast, reliable one. Full-fibre packages run from around 100 Mbps up to 1,000 Mbps and beyond, and crucially the upload is strong too, often the same speed as the download on the altnet providers. It is the most reliable connection you can buy because there is no ageing copper to corrode, get damp or slow down in the heat. Openreach has it past roughly 85% of UK homes now, with altnet builders like CityFibre and others adding millions more, so gigabit-capable lines reach over 90% of the country. If FTTP is available at your address, it is almost always the right answer; just work out the speed you actually need before you buy the biggest tier on the page.

Full fibre is the one most people should be reaching for, so here is a spread of live deals to show what it costs, with Virgin cable and the fastest line on the market alongside for contrast.

FTTC stands for fibre to the cabinet, and it is the connection most often sold simply as "fibre" or "superfast broadband". Fibre runs from the exchange to the green street cabinet on your road, and then the last stretch to your house travels down the old copper phone line. That copper is the catch.

Speeds run from about 36 Mbps to 80 Mbps, and where you land depends on how far your house sits from the cabinet, because copper fades with distance. Two neighbours on the same package can get very different speeds for that reason alone. Upload is the bigger weakness, usually 10 to 20 Mbps, which is why a video call from an FTTC house can freeze while the download side looks fine. FTTC still covers about 95% of the country and was a genuine step up in its day, but it is the past tense of broadband now, being actively retired as full fibre rolls out. If FTTC is all you can get, fine, but check for full fibre first.

Cable is the network Virgin Media built and still runs largely on its own. Technically it is hybrid fibre-coax: fibre to a local cabinet, then a coaxial cable, the fat round one, for the final hop, rather than the thin copper phone line FTTC uses. That coax carries a lot more than copper, which is why Virgin has offered fast downloads for years.

Download speeds go up to around 1,130 Mbps, genuinely quick, and Virgin's footprint covers a big chunk of the country that full fibre has not always reached. The weak spot is upload. Cable is asymmetric by design, so even on a gigabit download you may only get 35 to 50 Mbps up, far behind what full fibre gives you. For most households that download-led balance is fine. For heavy uploaders, video callers and people backing up large files, it is worth knowing before you sign.

5G home broadband swaps the cable for a wireless router that picks up a mobile signal, the same networks your phone uses. There is no engineer digging up the path to your door, you plug the hub in and it works, which makes it the quickest to set up and the easiest to walk away from.

Speeds are wide-ranging, from about 30 Mbps to 300 Mbps, and they depend entirely on how good the mobile signal is where you live and how busy the local mast gets. Upload is typically 10 to 50 Mbps. The appeal is flexibility: no long dig, often a rolling or short contract and a hub you can move. It suits renters, people in homes full fibre has not reached and anyone who wants a stopgap. The trade-off is that wireless is less predictable than a wire in the ground, so if a fixed line is available it is usually steadier.

ADSL is the original broadband, pure copper from the exchange to your house, and it tops out around 10 to 11 Mbps on a good day. It is slow, it is old and it is going. The UK's old phone network, the PSTN, is being switched off in January 2027, and the copper-only products that ride on it are being retired with it. If you are still on ADSL, you are not choosing it so much as waiting to be moved off it, and now is a good moment to jump straight to full fibre if you can get it.

The order is simple in most cases. If you can get full fibre, get full fibre: it is the fastest, the most reliable and the only one future-proofed past the 2027 copper switch-off. If full fibre has not reached you, cable is the next best for raw download speed, as long as you do not lean heavily on upload. FTTC is the fallback when neither is available, and 5G is the flexible option for renters, stopgaps and homes the wires have not reached.

Two numbers decide it in practice. Download is the headline everyone quotes, but upload is the one that separates full fibre from the rest, and it matters more than people expect if you work from home. And the speed you need is probably lower than the adverts push, so before you pay for a gigabit line, work out the speed you actually need and try speeding up the connection you have first, because the problem is often not the line at all. If your kit is the weak link rather than the line, start with whether your router is the problem.