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Comment by TorKlingberg | Hacker News Reader

Zero fiber in the UK? That looks wrong. Although, a lot of "fiber" sold in the UK is not actually fiber all the way to the home.

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Indeed, there's very little fibre in the UK. VDSL (DSL in that list) is being sold as fibre, and cable (cable in that list) is being sold as fibre, but cruicially, are not fibre.

Very few even vaguely close to fibre-like services (e.g. Hyperoptic) in the UK

I have 330mbs fttp in the UK, and I live in the countryside.

2% have fttp cover now, relatively few take it though.

There are very few use cases right now, I had 12mbs vdsl before, and I hardly notice that there is a difference to be honest, although my wife is a photographer and the high speed upload is a god send for her.

Is that the FTTP on demand product?

I've asked BT about that one and it looks like it's select exchanges only (even after FTTC has been rolled out), which is a shame as I'd happily pay for it.

The only "superfast" option I've got at the moment is a full leased line, whcih isn't a viable prospect for residential Internet..

No, I got it because of BDUK. I'm on a long leg to a hamlet, which makes fttc difficult (dslam is expensive and you have to run the fibre almost all the way in any case). Then it was option 4 infinity. In your case have you looked to an Openreach community build or Gigaclear?

Only FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) should count as fiber. In Belgium one of the larger cable providers used to advertise their plans as 'FiberNet' while it was only FTTN (fiber-to-the-neighbourhood) and the last step was cable (with significantly lower uplink speeds than what would be attainable with fiber).

We have a lot of fibre-to-the-cabinet in the UK, which means you may only have copper for a few hundred metres. It's obviously nowhere near as good as fibre to the home, but I think lumping it in with plain old DSL is a bit unfair - a lot of people get 60+mbps down and 18+mbps up which isn't too shabby internationally.

I used to have optical fiber in a brand new building in Osaka: the fiber was actually only going to the building, then it was RJ45 (or something very similar, I'll admit never trying to play with it).

It was much faster, and far more reliable than fios by Verizon that I have now in NYC...

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