If you’re signed up to a cheap broadband deal or a standard copper ADSL broadband service, your home’s location could dramatically affect your broadband speed. Or to be more specific, your speed is affected by how far you live from your nearest telephone exchange.
This is because ADSL broadband is delivered from the telephone exchange to your home along copper wires.The further your broadband signal has to travel, the weaker the signal and the slower the service will be.
Fibre-optic broadband services are less affected by your home’s location. However, that’s not to say that it’s not still a major factor in the speeds that customers can expect.
Fibre is a much more efficient way of delivering broadband than copper wires, so there’s virtually no loss of signal strength or speed during this part of your broadband’s journey to your home.
However, for standard fibre connections that most homes can get, a copper wire is still used to carry your broadband signal from the telephone cabinet into your property. And it’s in this part of the journey that your speed can be affected.
If you’re lucky enough to be signed up to a full fibre, or ‘fibre-to-the-premises’ (FTTP) service (such as BT and Sky’s Ultrafast packages, or a bespoke provider like Hyperoptic or Gigaclear), the speed of your broadband isn’t at all affected by your home’s distance from the exchange.
This is because as the phrase ‘to the premises’ suggests, FTTP broadband uses fibre-optic cables for the whole journey to your home. At no point are copper wires used.