Leased line, FTTP or FTTC: which does your business need?

FTTC – fibre to the cabinet – runs fibre to the green box in the street and copper for the last stretch to your building. It was the sensible middle option for a decade, and it is now on the way out.

The copper network it depends on is being retired, with a confirmed end date of 31 January 2027, and in most areas you can no longer order or change these services anyway. Anything still on FTTC needs a plan, not a renewal.

So while the question is often asked as a three-way choice, in practice it is now a two-way one: full fibre, or a leased line.

Every broadband service, FTTP included, is shared. Your connection runs back to equipment carrying traffic for many other premises, so the speed you get depends partly on what your neighbours are doing. That is contention, and it is why a connection can feel quick at eight in the morning and sluggish at two in the afternoon.

A leased line is uncontended. The capacity is yours, whether or not you use it, which is why it costs what it does. You are not paying for a bigger number; you are paying for the number to be true at four o’clock on a Tuesday.

For most offices, contended full fibre is genuinely fine. It stops being fine when the work is time-critical and the slow afternoon costs you something real.

Broadband is advertised on its download speed because that is what streaming needs. Business traffic increasingly runs the other way: video calls send your camera out, cloud backups push data up all night, and hosted phones need a steady upward path for every call.

An asymmetric connection with a fast download and a modest upload can look excellent on paper and still produce poor calls and slow backups. When you compare quotes, put the upload figures side by side first. It is the number that most often explains why a fast-sounding line feels slow.