Full fibre vs standard broadband: the price, the reliability, and whether it is still a choice

The short version, in a minute

Direct answer: Full fibre is better, it costs the same or less, and the option to stay on copper is being withdrawn anyway.

This page used to ask whether the extra speed was worth the extra money. Both halves of that question turn out to be wrong, which is why it has been rebuilt rather than edited. There is usually no extra money, and there is increasingly no choice.

On whether it is actually better, the regulator settles it rather than a provider. Ofcom, in its final statement of 17 March 2026: “FTTP products have materially lower fault rates than FTTC which results in a better overall outcome for users.” By how much is a question this page cannot answer: Ofcom holds the fault figures and redacts them in its published statement, so there is no public number behind any claim about how many times more reliable full fibre is.

Two of the six measures in the picture above are marked, because the usual claim about them does not survive the published figures. The upload one is ours to own: this site has said on four pages that full fibre means much better upload, and at the entry tier it does not. That correction is at the foot of this page, and our full fibre guide goes through the tier ladder in full.

What the two things are actually called

Direct answer: Full fibre runs glass to your wall. Standard broadband stops at a green box in your street.

The names are a mess and the mess is doing real harm, because a household with a bill that says Fibre reasonably assumes it already has fibre. Openreach's one line definitions are the clearest in the market, so this page uses them.

Part fibre, which is also FTTC, superfast and VDSL: “This means fibre runs to your local street cabinet, and copper cables connect the cabinet to your property.” And the older copper product beneath it: “Delivered entirely through copper lines from the exchange to your home.” Openreach quantifies why the cabinet matters: “Speeds can start to drop noticeably beyond around 300-400 metres from the cabinet.” That is a figure a household can pace out, and it is the whole reason this technology is uneven street by street.

Full fibre, which is also FTTP: Ofcom's definition is “The connection from the exchange to the premises is provided entirely over fibre. Generally, distance to the premises does not affect the speed delivered. Full fibre can offer gigabit speeds.” Read the middle sentence again, because it is the practical difference. Everything that was true about living a long way from the cabinet stops being true.

How to tell which one you have, in thirty seconds

Openreach words the test itself: “Unlike Full Fibre, FTTC doesn't require an Optical Network Terminal (ONT) - the connection comes in through your existing phone line socket, and your router plugs in from there.” A separate box on an internal wall means full fibre. A router plugged into a telephone socket, with no box anywhere, means copper carries the last stretch.

A bill that says Fibre does not mean full fibre. BT still sells Fibre Essential, Fibre 1 and Fibre 2 as part copper products, and TalkTalk still sells Fibre 35 and Fibre 65, and both now label the technology accurately at the point of sale.

The price, which is the surprise

Direct answer: At the two large providers that publish both prices openly, full fibre is the same price or cheaper.

This is the finding that changed what this page is for, and it is easy to check because both providers display these prices without asking for a postcode.

BT's Full Fibre 300 at £30.99 a month and its part copper Fibre 2 at £30.99 a month are the same price, for 300Mbps against 74Mbps. BT heads its own two groups on that page as All plans shown use Part Fibre technology and All plans shown use Full Fibre technology, so the comparison is BT's framing rather than ours.

TalkTalk's Full Fibre 150 at £25 per month is a pound cheaper than its part copper Fibre 65 at £26 per month, for more than double the download speed. And its Full Fibre 65 and Fibre 65 are both £26 for the same speed, which makes the technology the only difference between them.

Three honest caveats on that

Sky and Plusnet publish no monthly price for any broadband product without a postcode, so no full fibre against part fibre price comparison can be made at either without entering an address. So this page can compare BT with BT and TalkTalk with TalkTalk and cannot do the same at either of those two, and it says so rather than quoting a figure from somewhere else.

{ffs.vf.noFTTC} Which is worth noticing for its own sake: it is where the market is going, and the choice is disappearing from the shelf before it disappears from the network.

And a joining price is not a renewal price anywhere in this market. The figures above are what each provider advertises to a new customer, and the number that matters to an existing one is what they will be paying in month twenty five.

Reliability, properly sourced

Direct answer: Ofcom's own finding, not a provider's claim. And nobody can tell you by how much.

The claim that full fibre breaks less is made constantly and sourced almost never. It is also true, and the source is the regulator: Ofcom's Telecoms Access Review statement of 17 March 2026, Volume 5, paragraph 3.18. “FTTP products have materially lower fault rates than FTTC which results in a better overall outcome for users.”

That is a final published finding rather than a consultation position, and it is the sentence this site now uses wherever the subject comes up.

Why it is more reliable is not mysterious. Copper is a metal pair in the ground and in the air, and it is affected by water, by corrosion and by joints that were made decades ago. Glass is not. Openreach's own wording on its full fibre page says much the same in marketing terms, and we are treating that as a provider claim rather than evidence, which is what it is.

Upload, where we were wrong

Direct answer: True at the top of the tier ladder. Not true at all at the bottom.

On Sky's own published figures, Full Fibre 75 uploads at 16Mbps and part copper Superfast uploads at 16Mbps, and Full Fibre 150 uploads at 27Mbps and part copper Ultrafast over G.Fast uploads at 27Mbps. The upload gain from full fibre begins at the 300Mbps tier, where it reaches 40Mbps.

That is Sky's own published ladder, and Sky is the only large UK retailer that publishes download and upload for every tier it sells, which is why the comparison can be made at all. A household moving from part fibre to an entry level full fibre tier gains reliability, independence from the cabinet and headroom on download, and gains nothing whatever on upload.

So the honest advice is to compare the tier rather than the technology. If upload is why you are moving, the figure to look for starts at the 300Mbps tier and not before it.

Why upload matters at all, carefully

Ofcom publishes a reason, and it is the only primary source found for one: “Upload speeds, which are particularly important for people who use video communication services like Zoom or Teams, or who play video games online, are also increasing.” That page is dated 17 March 2023, which is three and a half years before this was written, and the data in it is from 2022.

No regulator or government source was found linking upload speed to working from home or cloud backup. Ofcom's published reasoning names video calls and online gaming and stops there. So where this site argues that upload matters for cloud backup, for working from home or for a household with two people sending at once, that is our reasoning and it is marked as ours rather than dressed up as a regulator's finding.

The window that is closing

Direct answer: Openreach removes the copper option exchange by exchange, and the rule catches a routine package change.

This is the part of the subject that almost nothing written for households covers, and it is the reason the framing of this page changed. Openreach stops selling copper based products in an exchange once most of it can get full fibre: “Stop Sell is triggered when a majority (75%) of premises connected to a particular exchange can get ultrafast Full Fibre.”

Now the sentence that matters, and it is worth reading twice: “Customers who then want to switch, upgrade or re-grade their broadband or phone service will have to take a new digital service over our new Full Fibre network.” Read who that catches. Not somebody ordering a line in a new house, but somebody doing the ordinary thing at the end of a contract.

1,281 exchanges across the UK, covering around 12.5 million premises, were under active stop sell, which Openreach put at 51% of its total full fibre footprint.

There is a protection, and its scope is narrower than it first reads: “Customers in these exchanges not yet able to get Ultrafast Full Fibre at their premises won't be impacted and can stay on their existing copper-based service until Full Fibre does become available.” That covers households that CANNOT yet get full fibre. It does not say a household that can get it may keep the copper option, and the sentence above says it may not.

Should you move, and when?

Direct answer: Three questions, and five jobs sorted into the ones worth doing today and the ones that wait for your renewal.

The second question is the honest one, and it is the one this kind of page usually skips. A household whose complaint is a room with no signal has a Wi-Fi problem, and no change of technology fixes it. A household losing its connection in the rain has a copper problem, and this page is the whole answer.

The third question decides the timing and nothing else. Nobody should pay to leave a contract early to move to a product that costs the same, and almost nobody needs to.

It runs entirely in your browser. There is no form to submit, nothing sent to any server and nothing stored.

The switch-off, and whose date it is

Direct answer: 31 January 2027 for the phone network. Copper broadband goes more slowly, exchange by exchange.

Two timetables run alongside each other and almost everybody writing about this conflates them. The phone network has a fixed national date. Copper broadband does not, and retires on the stop sell programme above.

On the phone network, the sources agree. Openreach: “On 31 January 2027, all traditional phone lines will be going digital”. The government: “All users of the Openreach PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) will need to be migrated to new services by the 31 January 2027.” And Openreach again, in a dated news article: “Openreach is urging Communications Providers (CPs) and their business customers to hurry up with plans to move off UK's old phone network, known as the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), before it's retired on 31 January 2027.”

Every primary source checked gives the same date. Openreach, the government and Ofcom all say 31 January 2027, and the only differences are in style and precision. So anybody telling you the date has moved or is disputed is working from something out of date, and this page checked five pages across three sites to be able to say that.

One correction worth making, because it is everywhere

Ofcom is not switching copper off. Ofcom: “BT plans to retire its old landline network by 31 January 2027.” The regulator reports the date rather than setting it, and it is an industry deadline rather than a regulatory one. Ofcom has decided to move its own regulation to match, which is a different thing: “As part of transitioning to full-fibre networks and gradually shutting down old telephone exchanges, Openreach should not have to incur unnecessary costs for running two networks at the same time. We will progressively shift regulation away from copper services to full fibre services, giving Openreach flexibility to encourage customers to migrate off its old copper network.”

How much is left to move: “Openreach estimates around 1.5 million lines are still operating on the old copper-based phone network, including around 350k business premises.” Most of the country has already gone, quietly, without anybody noticing.

The phone side of this has a guide of its own, because it is a bigger subject than a line on this page. Our digital voice guide covers what happens to your handset, your number and your alarm, and the one provider that publishes a deadline for declining it.

Will you pay more once copper has gone?

Direct answer: Ofcom extended the price protection rather than removing it, and the decision is final rather than proposed.

This is the question every household asks about the switch-off, and it has a published answer from 17 March 2026 that almost nothing repeats.

Ofcom: “We will cap the nominal price that Openreach can charge retail providers like Vodafone or Sky, who lease its infrastructure, for download speeds up to 80Mbit/s, rather than 40Mbit/s at present. The prices of higher-speed products will remain unregulated, so providers have an incentive to invest in networks that can deliver faster speeds.” Read that carefully. The regulated price anchor moves UP, from 40Mbit/s to 80Mbit/s, so a speed equivalent to what copper delivered stays price protected once it is carried on fibre. Everything faster than that is unregulated, and always was.

Ofcom also published its own definition of what is happening, which is more useful than most of the industry's: “As Openreach rolls out its full-fibre network, customers currently using its legacy copper-based network will migrate, either to Openreach's full-fibre network or to rival networks. This means that, eventually, Openreach's copper-based network can be decommissioned to avoid the costly running of two parallel networks. This is known as 'copper retirement'.”

And the honest caveat: “Alongside our decisions today, we are consulting on the specific conditions for when price protections on copper-based services should be removed.” So the conditions under which copper price protections come off were still open when this was written, and this page says so rather than guessing at the outcome.

Three Openreach figures that disagree

Direct answer: All three are live, all three are on openreach.com, and not one of them carries a date.

A reader checking the coverage figure on this page will very likely meet one of these first, so they are named rather than ignored.

On its big switch off page: “Full Fibre is already available to over 23 million homes and businesses, helping support faster, more reliable connections for the way we live and work today.” Then, on its page about retiring the copper network: “Full Fibre network - which is already available to 11m homes and businesses nationwide”. Same measure, half the number.

And on its fibre availability page: “fibre broadband is already available in more than 96.59 per cent of the UK.” That figure can only be reached by counting the copper based product as fibre, because it matches what Openreach claims for FTTC on its own FTTC page. The same page also says this: “we've already connected 19 million premises and we plan to connect 25 million by the end of December 2026.” A third number again, although connected is a different measure from available.

Ofcom's figure for full fibre coverage, from the same period, is “full-fibre coverage stands at 78%”, and from its later Connected Nations update it is 82%. This page uses the Ofcom figures, because they carry dates and the Openreach pages do not.

Live deals at your postcode

Direct answer: The list below is the only place this page can tell you which of the two you are actually able to buy.

The check below shows every provider that reaches the address, lowest price first, across both technologies and including the smaller networks that no national figure counts separately. Compare the full fibre price against what you pay now before assuming it is the dearer option.

What this page used to say, and why it changed

Direct answer: Four corrections, and the first two are the reason this page was rebuilt rather than edited.

The first changes what the page is for. The second costs this site an easy selling point and is the version the published figures support. Printing them here rather than quietly editing is the only way somebody who read the old page can tell what changed.

In short

1. The old question was whether the extra speed is worth the extra money.
2. At two large providers there is no extra money.
3. BT's Full Fibre 300 at £30.99 a month and its part copper Fibre 2 at £30.99 a month are the same price, for 300Mbps against 74Mbps.
4. TalkTalk's Full Fibre 150 at £25 per month is a pound cheaper than its part copper Fibre 65 at £26 per month, for more than double the download speed.
5. {ffs.vf.noFTTC}
6. Sky and Plusnet publish no monthly price for any broadband product without a postcode, so no full fibre against part fibre price comparison can be made at either without entering an address.
7. On reliability, Ofcom settles it: “FTTP products have materially lower fault rates than FTTC which results in a better overall outcome for users.”
8. Ofcom holds the fault figures and redacts them in its published statement, so there is no public number behind any claim about how many times more reliable full fibre is.
9. On upload, we were wrong, and this is the honest version.
10. On Sky's own published figures, Full Fibre 75 uploads at 16Mbps and part copper Superfast uploads at 16Mbps, and Full Fibre 150 uploads at 27Mbps and part copper Ultrafast over G.Fast uploads at 27Mbps. The upload gain from full fibre begins at the 300Mbps tier, where it reaches 40Mbps.
11. And it is becoming less of a choice.
12. Openreach: “Stop Sell is triggered when a majority (75%) of premises connected to a particular exchange can get ultrafast Full Fibre.”
13. Openreach: “Customers who then want to switch, upgrade or re-grade their broadband or phone service will have to take a new digital service over our new Full Fibre network.”
14. 1,281 exchanges across the UK, covering around 12.5 million premises, were under active stop sell, which Openreach put at 51% of its total full fibre footprint.
15. Openreach: “Customers in these exchanges not yet able to get Ultrafast Full Fibre at their premises won't be impacted and can stay on their existing copper-based service until Full Fibre does become available.”
16. Openreach publishes no public list of stop sell exchanges. It announces each tranche as a news item and gives communication providers a year's notice, and the only way a household can find out is the postcode checker.
17. The old phone network goes on 31 January 2027.
18. Openreach: “Openreach is urging Communications Providers (CPs) and their business customers to hurry up with plans to move off UK's old phone network, known as the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), before it's retired on 31 January 2027.”
19. Government: “All users of the Openreach PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) will need to be migrated to new services by the 31 January 2027.”
20. Ofcom, reporting rather than setting it: “BT plans to retire its old landline network by 31 January 2027.”
21. Every primary source checked gives the same date. Openreach, the government and Ofcom all say 31 January 2027, and the only differences are in style and precision.
22. Openreach: “Openreach estimates around 1.5 million lines are still operating on the old copper-based phone network, including around 350k business premises.”
23. On prices afterwards, Ofcom extended the protection rather than removing it.
24. Ofcom: “We will cap the nominal price that Openreach can charge retail providers like Vodafone or Sky, who lease its infrastructure, for download speeds up to 80Mbit/s, rather than 40Mbit/s at present. The prices of higher-speed products will remain unregulated, so providers have an incentive to invest in networks that can deliver faster speeds.”
25. Ofcom: “Alongside our decisions today, we are consulting on the specific conditions for when price protections on copper-based services should be removed.”
26. Three Openreach pages give three different coverage figures.
27. Openreach: “Full Fibre is already available to over 23 million homes and businesses, helping support faster, more reliable connections for the way we live and work today.”
28. Openreach: “Full Fibre network - which is already available to 11m homes and businesses nationwide”
29. Openreach: “fibre broadband is already available in more than 96.59 per cent of the UK.”
30. Ofcom's figure for full fibre on the same dates is “full-fibre coverage stands at 78%”
31. Thirty seconds settles which you have. Openreach: “Unlike Full Fibre, FTTC doesn't require an Optical Network Terminal (ONT) - the connection comes in through your existing phone line socket, and your router plugs in from there.”

Each line stands on its own and carries its date. Reviewed by a person at least quarterly, last on 4 October 2026.