Why the internet landscape after lockdown looks a lot faster

It’s not going to be free forever; just as long as children remain locked out of their classrooms and forced to study at home. But it’s a welcome development, and not just within the houses that will benefit – for it helps to spread the word about a new and faster kind of connection that has been in the works for years but is only now starting to catch on.

Most broadband these days uses fibre optic cables for at least part of the journey between the telephone exchange and your home. But the standard product still relies on old-fashioned copper wires between those green BT cabinets on street corners and your front door. This is known as fibre-to-the-cabinet broadband, or FTTC for short.

The problem is that the speed drops off dramatically as soon as it hits the copper cables. The further the cabinet is from your house, the greater the loss of speed.

Running fibre-optic cables all the way to your house – a system known variously as full-fibre, fire to the premises or FTTP – is better, faster and more reliable. It’s also more expensive to install, which is why it is so far available only in areas of high density housing. But a number of local initiatives have also sprung up in partnership with Openreach, the infrastructure subsidiary of BT. The costs are split between the company and the community, and it is these organisations that are behind some of the free initiatives during lockdown.

Even if you are not entitled to one of these offers, it is worth checking to see if your house is in a catchment area, because you could end up with a much faster connection than your existing one, for not much more money.

Full-fibre broadband is capable of delivering the internet at three gigabits (or 3,000 megabits) per second, compared with a maximum of 80 megabits per second on the best FTTC connection. That’s fast enough to stream Netflix in ultra high definition while someone else in the house plays video games. It’s as future-proof as anything on the internet can ever be.

Even a throttled-back full-fibre connection can deliver 150 megabits per second, which is more than ample for any domestic application today. Yet the cost of such a deal is around £38 a month after the initial offer period. That’s less than some FTTC deals at half the speed.

You can find out whether your street is in a full-fibre area by typing your postcode into the Openreach website. If not, it will tell you whether FTTC is available, and at what speed. It may also give you an in-between option known as GFast, an improved fibre-to-the-cabinet system which does not do away with copper entirely but can still deliver speeds of up to 330 megabits per second – around four times faster than conventional FTTC broadband. BT, TalkTalk, EE and Zen are among the companies offering this, at around £40 a month on an 18-month contract.

Those companies also offer full-fibre services in certain areas but you should also check with a specialist provider like Hyperoptic, which is active in parts of York and in various pockets across West Yorkshire. It is among the companies to have partnered with local councils to supply free broadband at 50 megabits per second to families on their patch who are currently using much slower connections. Leeds is the only council in Yorkshire to benefit, but with Hyperoptic aspiring to cover 2m urban properties by the end of the year, the post-lockdown landscape suddenly looks a great deal faster.

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