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Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

Not sure you've got this right? There are no private FTTC networks in the UK. They all use openreach.

There are many private FTTH networks, but they'd be laying fibre not copper.

Also if you are in a city, you surely will have many good 5G options. You can get unlimited 5G broadband for £20-60/month depending on operator. Speeds are generally very good.

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Hull doesn't use Openreach all the cabinets are private KCOM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KCOM_Group

Ok, fine apart from Hull then.

Virgin Media does not use Openreach, and they lay FTTC and then uses multi-core copper (coax) from the cabinet to the home. Although they're the only FTTC that roll their own as far as I know. The other non openreach are Hyperoptic and Gigaclear and they provide FTTH.

Ok, correct, I was thinking of FTTC as in VDSL. I haven't heard of VM being "FTTC" before. Though even most of VMs new rollout is actually FTTH, albeit RFoG (for now).

Bingo! I didn't want to name them, to give them free publicity.

I'd be very surprised they are laying copper though. Nearly all of their network expansion has been FTTH.

There are others. 6 months ago a small ISP called 4th Utility (https://the4thutility.co.uk/) wired my building. I think it’s GPON, their max offering is 300 Mbps symmetrical, which is a whole lot better than OpenReach’s lousy “super fast fibre” that painfully did 40 down and 8 up despite promising 72 down.

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