Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

At first sight Fibre to the Cabinet and Ethernet First Mile seem to be very similar products at vastly different prices. BTWholesale (BTW) launched EFM at the beginning of 2010 and almost exactly a year later Talk Talk Business (TTB) announced that they had enabled just under 2000 exchanges for their version of the product. At the same time BTW rolled out FTTC, starting with a handful of exchanges in early 2010 but quickly accelerating their roll out.

With FTTC BTW run fibre from the exchange to one of the green cabinets at the end of your road so that the amount of copper involved is kept to a minimum. This allows more consistently fast broadband speeds up to 80Mbit/s downstream and 20Mbit/s upstream. The average price for FTTC is around £40 per month whereas EFM is around £200 per month.

So why would anyone fork out for EFM if they can get FTTC?

The underlying cost elements are roughly the same in that both are delivered to the premises over copper wire. In the case of FTTC a single twisted pair and with EFM usually multiple pairs bonded together. Similarly the cost of the backhaul bandwidth from the exchange is the same. The big difference is how much bandwidth you actually get. With EFM it is all yours – you pay for 10Mbit/s symmetrical bandwidth and that’s what you get – 100% of the time. With FTTC you are sharing the bandwidth with a number of other customers and BTW only offer a ‘best effort’ planned downstream throughput which varies according to the maximum speed of the equipment in the exchange.

Another consideration is lead-time. Where available, FTTC can be delivered in days whereas EFM can take many weeks to be installed. Also FTTC uses the same back-end systems as BTW broadband.

If you have customers looking to upgrade their connectivity contact Jola and find out how we can help.