Fiber to the Cabinet Installation Info

Firstly, what is FTTC, Fibre To The Cabinet is a service that BT is rolling out throughout the UK to provide stable, fast broadband to home users without requiring additional equipment to the customer premises. The service to the client premises is still delivered over the standard copper pairs used for PSTN provision, in the same way ADSL and ADSL2+ are, and it uses the same basic technology of frequency shift to 'shift' the data bits into a higher frequency range. The separation of this at customer premises takes place within the BT master socket, which is replaced during the installation of FTTC by a BT engineer. At the other end of your line things change quite dramatically.

In ADSL/ADSL2+ the BT copper pairs go from your master socket to a junction box in the street (the street cab), this then can pass through other street cabs/junction boxes  and then eventually ends back in a BT exchange on a Main Distribution Frame (MDF). From here your line goes into an ADSL line card which is part of the DSLAM and provides the modem part (modulation, de-modulation). This then turns into a 'regular' Ethernet-like connection and will be fed back to BT Wholesale via their fibre connections to the exchange.

Optical Network Unit

In FTTC the street cabinet is upgraded and takes a fibre connection from the exchange. The street cabinet then has the fibre-to-copper hardware inside it and this then uses the copper pairs to your premises to transmit the broadband. This reduces the distance the copper pairs are transmitting the data signal, and therefore provides much higher quality and therefore potential speeds.