Switching to Full Fibre Doesn’t Just Give You Faster Broadband

There are many benefits to switching to Full Fibre broadband, something the UK is in line to achieve before 2025. These don’t only include faster download and upload speeds, but there are many other benefits too.

One of the drawbacks of copper cable is that it is heavy, another is that it is fragile. It weighs about 10g per foot, and there were 57,000,000 miles of copper cable buried under the ground and hanging from telegraph poles, (I’ve done the numbers, that’s 3,960,000 tonnes) and it’s easy for it to get damaged by high winds, damage poles, roadworks digging in the wrong place and many other causes.

Copper Is Costly

Copper is also valuable. At the time of writing the value of refined copper is $7,450 per tonne. With almost four million tonnes of copper lying around, that’s a huge resource, and a huge temptation. Throughout the UK and elsewhere there have been several incidents where there have been phone and internet outages due to people stealing data cabl e. (With the very low amperages used in telephony and data, it’s clearly a much safer bet than stealing electrical cable!) Fibre on the other hand is virtually valueless to anyone who isn’t a fibre installer.

So fibre’s more likely to be left in the ground, and while it’s there it’s a lot less likely to require maintenance too. Verizon, the US phone and data provider report that in New York, after installing fibre there has been a 60% reduction in truck deployments to maintenance issues, and a 40–60% reduction in associated costs.

Fibre is very light as each filament is narrower than a hair, and it’s robust too. Not only is it very flexible, and it can lie alongside power lines making installation alongside existing infrastructure in many situations much easier. Copper cable can’t be installed parallel to nearby electrical lines because the power flowing along them creates a magnetic field. This magnetic field in turn causes interference with the data cables which slows down efficient data transfer.

Full Fibre Benefits The Environment

There are other surprising benefits to switching from copper to Full Fibre. It’s environmentally friendlier for example. All that copper had to be mined, refined, transported and while it’s in use it requires more energy to run than fibre (there are also ethical issues surrounding mining copper ores, from environmental destruction, to poor working conditions and child labour). Refining copper ores is in itself bad for the environment too. 2kg of refined copper takes many times more that weight in copper ore, and the process to get that much metal would produce a tonne of carbon dioxide. Those 2kg of copper would create 200 feet of cable, however, the same length of fibre optic line would result in approximately 60g of carbon dioxide. A clear win for the environmental impact of reducing Greenhouse Gases.

If all your connected Smart devices can work more quickly and efficiently, there are energy savings to be made there too, and that’s in addition to the energy savings that properly adjusted things like Smart thermostats and environmental controls can make.

Work From Home With Ease

The speeds which Full Fibre can give also makes it easier to work from home, meaning fewer cars on the road at rush hour, reducing our carbon footprint significantly, even if you’re only working from home one or two days a week. The ability to work from home also improves your prospects. You may have a talent which is in demand, but the old fashioned commute, caring commitments, or a disability may have meant you felt excluded. However, if you’re able to take that opportunity without leaving the house your horizons have broadened instantly. That means employers benefit too. When there’s no need to rely on the local pool of candidates and those willing to relocate, they have access to potential employees who can make a huge contribution to their business completely unhindered by geography.

Briant Broadband work with CityFibre to ensure that Worthing gets reliable Full Fibre broadband at a great price from a genuinely local company of friendly, expert engineers. For more information, or to book your appointment for connection and installation call us on 01903 221999, email info@briantbroadband.com or visit the Briant Broadband website

Originally published at https://www.briantcomms.com on October 12, 2022.