A few reasons to care about full fibre broadband

By Justin Leese, Chief Technology and Operations Officer

Top tunes, show tunes, folk ballads and sacred anthems. The belters and the bangers. When you tap out a rhythm with your fingers or your feet, you conjure the whole experience. Not just the music, but the memories, the moments and the mood. I can tell you exactly where I was – and how I was – when I first heard The Manics’ ‘Design for Life’. Such rich information, from a few simple finger taps.

Pretty wonderfully, music has never been more accessible than it is now, thanks to digital technology and the internet. More accessible to make, to share, and of course, to bathe yourself in the experience.

If you stream your tunes over Ogi they flow from us to you as rich information too, and our equivalent of each finger tap is the briefest flicker of light. Just light, pure and simple, from the heart of our network all the way into your home. Light with nothing added and almost nothing taken away.

Those streams of light flow inside an optical fibre: a strand of glass that allows those tiny pulses to move swiftly and cleanly over some very impressive distances. You can even bend the strand and it still does its thing. You could say it’s a kinda magic (thanks Freddy.)

Is this relevant to you and your experience?

Yes, in lots and lots of ways. Great broadband experiences in the UK – for music or anything else – are a bit of a postcode lottery. So we’re fixing that. Full fibre broadband isn’t affected by stuff that plagues every other kind of broadband – like the distance of your home from your nearest big green cabinet, or old copper cabling, or the weather that day. That means its performance is very predictable – metronomic, in fact. And because it’s a new kind of infrastructure with fewer active parts, it’s a lot more reliable too. That means that you get the service that the marketing promised you, with no exceptions.

Also, the service we provide you is future proofed. When the time comes – and it will –  to increase your Ogi speed  x10, or even x100, we can do that affordably, without any unplanned disruption or delay for you. And ultimately that comes down to ‘a trick of the light’. Light comes in many colours so let’s imagine right now we’re pulsing red light through Ogi’s fibres. We can add capacity by using additional colours. And by the way, our fibre can carry a whole rainbow, and then some. That’s why we say that our network will be a positive legacy in Wales for the next five generations, at least.

Then again, full fibre broadband is more sustainable. We can build it just once and then continually up-cycle it – as I’ve just described above. And on a day to day basis, operating a full fibre network can save a lot of power and CO2. Those light pulses travel a long way, between us to you, without us needing to either amplify them or convert them into any other kind of signal. So full fibre is the choice to make if you care about people and our future on this planet.

Maybe the best reason for the here and now is that full fibre broadband brings you the ultimate, unlimited, prime-time digital experiences: for living, learning, working and wellbeing. If you want to be your best digital you, choose full fibre.

Typically, networks have not been built this way. 

Services advertising superfast ‘fibre broadband’ have been around for a while, and might lead you to believe that this fibre thing is nothing new. But they’re not telling the whole truth. Their fibre only runs part of the way to your home. And where it ends, telephone lines or other sorts of old copper cables take over. Your broadband experience is only as good as the broadest, most reliable link in the chain from network to home. So how can partial fibre solutions fix anything?

It takes time, expertise and a lot of investment to build full fibre broadband networks – which is why they are pretty rare here. In an international league table of full fibre connections, the UK currently sits at no. 22. We can do better.

So when we emphasise our full fibre broadband services, it’s not some marketing gimmick, or us trying to out-shout the competition. For us, it’s a standard that all broadband networks need to ultimately achieve. And for you, it’s a guarantee of the fastest, greenest and downright bestest musical, magical, digital experience that your money can buy.