The deployment of FTTC has been fast and furious over the last year or so, with new green cabinets popping up all over the country. We are now at a point where coverage is much better and FTTC is available to many more locations. Those in charge of marketing superfast broadband tend to emphasise the increased download speeds you can expect. Admittedly, for the majority of domestic users download speeds are all important as they tend to consume more than they contribute to the Internet. However for business users, upload speeds can be just as important.

Upload speed is frequently overlooked. Upload speed is critical for some applications which need symmetric bandwidth, application such as VoIP or Citrix rely on good bandwidth both up and down. Also, companies that need to send data as much as receive it, can benefit from FTTC.  Large media files, PowerPoint or CAD files are all transferred much quicker.

Small branch offices can significantly benefit from the higher upload speeds available for FTTC. We have customers with less than 5 people in an office running Citrix, previously on an ADSL service, this sometimes caused issues if other people with fat clients worked from that office. Now with FTTC they are able to work comfortably even when there are additional staff in the office.

If you are located close to your local exchange, you can achieve upload speeds in the region of 1Mbps using conventional ADSL services. Annex M may offer a slightly higher upload but only 50% or so of ADSL 2+ lines can benefit from Annex M. We recently analysed over 1000 customer ADSL circuits to see if they could receive FTTC and to look at indicated download and upload speed. The check showed that over 92% of these FTTC lines could achieve more than 5Mbit/s upload!

So if you can get FTTC to your premises but aren’t convinced you need up to 40Mbps download speeds, consider how significantly increased upload speed might deliver efficiencies through faster transmission of large files, improved application performance and more usable VoIP services.