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Comment by harel | Hacker News Reader

Is that fiber to the property or fiber to the cabinet? In the UK I get FTTC which means the last bit from the cabinet down the road to my house is copper wires. My speed is bottlenecked by that. New builds and flats get services for the building giving them full fiber. My fiber is only as fast as my copper wire to the cabinet allows

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France doesn't have much FTTC, VDSL and HFC exist but are fairly rare.

Orange has started decommissioning its legacy copper network.

It is FttH (fibre to the home)

Yes... Semantics and old age don't mix

There are a few places that had cable before mainstream fiber deployment (so FTTC), but the norm in France for new installations for at least the last 10 years has been FTTH (including in the countryside).

When I moved a couple years ago and got fiber with Virgin they came and pulled fiber from the cabinet down the road to the house, with no extra charge.

I think FTTC is just called (V)DSL in most places. IME it's uncommon to call anything less than FTTB (basement / building) fiber.

In UK FTTC is called “fibre” and FTTP is called “full fibre”. I only have FTTC. To be honest it’s enough for my use cases but I will upgrade if FTTP ever becomes available.

In Ireland, Eircom, way back in the day, called ADSL _exchanges which had a fibre connection_ (versus microwave) “fibre-powered broadband”. This lead to confusion when they launched their VDSL product, and even more confusion when they launched their FTTH product.

But that's already so much faster than ADSL. I just got "Fiber to Home" last year and frankly the only difference I could see is when I download a big file with a torrent. I am convinced that direct downloads and web pages were already limited by other stuff that the bandwidth.

Also that's kind of irrelevant because it is free/cheap to get the ISP to pay for bringing fiber into the home (at least if you are in an urbanized area ? But if not, the paragraph above still applies)

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