Is Fibre Broadband Right for Your Business?

The word "fibre" covers three very different products. FTTC, FTTP and leased lines all use fibre somewhere in the network, but they deliver different speeds, reliability and cost. Get the choice wrong and you either overpay for bandwidth you never touch, or you throttle a team that lives in the cloud. This guide walks through how to decide, and where each option fits across your wider business broadband options and business leased line choices.

What are the three main fibre options for UK businesses?

UK businesses choose between three fibre-based connections: FTTC (part fibre, part copper), FTTP (full fibre to the building) and a leased line (a dedicated, uncontended circuit). Each climbs in speed, reliability and price. The right one depends on staff numbers, cloud reliance and how much an outage actually costs you.

FTTC — Fibre to the Cabinet. Fibre runs from the exchange to a street cabinet, then copper covers the last stretch to your building. It is the most widely available technology in the UK, delivering typically 40–80Mbps download and 8–20Mbps upload. Right for small offices of 1–15 staff with standard cloud workloads where FTTP is not yet available. Not suitable once your team grows, upload becomes a bottleneck, or you have had reliability problems.

FTTP — Full Fibre to the Premises. Fibre runs all the way to your building, removing the copper last mile. Download speeds of 150Mbps–1Gbps are available, with far better upload than FTTC and steadier performance through the day. Right for businesses of 5–60 staff with heavy cloud usage, Teams or Zoom meetings, hosted VoIP, or significant file transfer. Ofcom's Connected Nations reporting tracks how fast full fibre is reaching UK premises, and coverage is now broad across most urban areas (Ofcom).

Leased line — a dedicated circuit. A symmetric fibre circuit connects your premises directly to the provider's network. No sharing, guaranteed bandwidth, and an SLA with defined response and repair times. To understand the model, see what a leased line is. Right for businesses of 20+ staff where reliability has a direct commercial cost. Not suitable when your needs are modest, or you cannot justify the cost of a dedicated circuit, which starts from £69/month.

How does FTTC compare to FTTP and a leased line?

The three products differ on four things that matter to a business buyer: download speed, upload speed, contention (whether bandwidth is shared) and SLA backing. FTTC trades performance for availability, FTTP balances speed and price, and a leased line buys certainty. The table below sets out the practical differences.

A FTTP leased line sits between standard full fibre and a traditional Ethernet circuit, giving SLA-backed performance where full leased-line pricing is hard to justify. The Government's Project Gigabit programme continues to extend gigabit-capable coverage, widening the FTTP option for businesses outside city centres (gov.uk).

How many staff can each connection type support?

Staff count is the fastest way to narrow the field, because it sets the number of people drawing on the connection at once. As concurrent users rise, shared broadband contention starts to bite and the case for dedicated bandwidth grows. Use these bands as a starting point, then adjust for how cloud-heavy your team is.

• 1–10 staff — FTTC or lower-tier FTTP is typically sufficient.
• 10–30 staff — FTTP at 300–500Mbps is appropriate in most cases.
• 30–80 staff — FTTP 900Mbps or a leased line, depending on workload intensity.
• 80+ staff — A leased line or multiple circuits is almost always the right answer.

These bands assume normal office workloads. A 15-person firm running every client task in cloud platforms can need a leased line, while a 30-person team split between office and remote working may sit comfortably on FTTP. For multi-office estates, look at multi-site connectivity so each site is sized correctly rather than averaged.

Do upload speeds matter more than download for your business?

For many modern businesses, yes. FTTC offers modest upload (8–20Mbps); FTTP improves it (30–100+Mbps) but stays asymmetric; a leased line gives equal upload and download. If you push large files outbound, host services, or run video calls across several rooms, upload is a primary consideration, not an afterthought.

Cloud phone systems make this concrete. Both FTTC and FTTP carry VoIP, but call quality depends on stable upload, not raw download. Offices with 10 or more simultaneous callers are better served by FTTP, and large deployments benefit from the dedicated upload of a leased line. If voice is business-critical, plan the connection and the phone platform together — see business VoIP and a managed hosted phone system for how the two fit.

What is the real cost of downtime for your business?

Downtime cost is the deciding factor between broadband and a leased line. For a sole trader, a few hours offline is an annoyance. For a 40-person professional services firm where every client task runs in the cloud, the same outage can cost thousands of pounds in lost billable time. The heavier your dependency, the more an SLA is worth.

This is why the question is commercial, not just technical. A leased line's guaranteed fix times exist precisely to cap that downtime cost. When you map the monthly premium of a dedicated circuit against an hour or two of lost productivity, the gap often closes fast. Availability also shapes the answer: FTTP is not universal, and leased-line pricing varies by location, so running an availability check on your exact address is the only way to know your real options.

What does AMVIA recommend?

Our position is simple. Any business with five or more staff should be on at least business FTTP rather than FTTC. For teams of 15–20+ leaning heavily on cloud systems, request a leased line quotation alongside FTTP, because the price gap is often smaller than expected and the performance difference is substantial.

We check availability and compare pricing across every major network as part of each connectivity review. No single technology or provider fits every business, and the right answer is always specific to your address and your workload. One provider, security-first, with the connection and the systems that run on it reviewed together rather than in isolation.