What Is Business Fibre? Types, Speeds & Costs Explained

Why is the word 'fibre' so confusing?

"Fibre" has been stretched to cover almost any broadband product sold in the UK, from a copper line with a fibre segment to a fully dedicated circuit. The label tells you almost nothing about performance. What matters is where the fibre stops and copper takes over — and whether the bandwidth is shared.

UK regulators tightened the rules on this for a reason. Ofcom now requires providers to be clearer about connection type and the speeds a customer can realistically expect, because "fibre broadband" had become near-meaningless as a buying signal (Ofcom). For a business, the practical question is simple: is the fibre running all the way to your building, and is the bandwidth yours alone?

What is FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet)?

FTTC is the most common "fibre" product in the UK and what most businesses mean when they say they have fibre broadband. Fibre runs from the exchange to the green street cabinet near your premises, then copper telephone wire carries the connection the final stretch into your building. That copper final mile is the bottleneck.

Speed degrades with distance from the cabinet. A business next door to a cabinet may get close to the advertised 80Mbps download / 20Mbps upload; a business 500 metres away may see 40Mbps or less. FTTC still works for small teams with modest needs, but it is now a transitional technology as the UK moves to full fibre.

• Final mile: copper (the limiting factor)
• Typical speed: up to 80Mbps down / 20Mbps up, falling with distance
• Contention: shared bandwidth, best-efforts service
• Typical FTTC business broadband pricing: £25–£55/month on a 24-month contract

If your team lives in Microsoft 365, Teams calls and cloud apps, FTTC's weak upload and variability will show. That is usually the trigger to look at FTTP or a business leased line.

What is FTTP (Fibre to the Premises)?

FTTP removes the copper segment entirely — fibre runs from the exchange directly into your building. The result is consistent speed regardless of distance from the cabinet, higher maximum speeds (up to 1Gbps), and lower latency than FTTC. Where FTTP is available, it should be the default choice over FTTC for any business that depends on reliable performance.

Speeds run from 100Mbps to 1Gbps depending on the infrastructure provider, and the connection quality is materially better than FTTC at every tier. FTTP is delivered over Openreach's expanding network and over CityFibre in the 285+ towns and cities where CityFibre has built its own infrastructure. Coverage now reaches the majority of urban business premises and is expanding into suburban and semi-rural areas, with new build-outs published regularly by Openreach.

• Final mile: fibre all the way (no copper)
• Typical speed: 100Mbps to 1Gbps download
• Upload: typically 50–100Mbps on higher tiers — far better than FTTC, lower than a leased line
• Typical FTTP business broadband pricing: £35–£100/month depending on speed and provider

FTTP is broadband, not a dedicated circuit — the bandwidth is still contended (shared with other users on the network). For most small teams that is fine. When it stops being fine, the answer is a leased line.

What is an Ethernet leased line?

A leased line is a dedicated fibre circuit giving you a private, uncontended connection straight to your premises. Unlike FTTC and FTTP broadband, the bandwidth is never shared — your 100Mbps or 1Gbps is yours at all times, in both directions. This is the product businesses move to when connectivity becomes genuinely business-critical.

Leased lines are symmetrical — upload equals download — which matters for cloud backup, VoIP, video and remote-working infrastructure that pushes data out as hard as it pulls it in. They also carry a formal SLA, typically guaranteeing uptime and a maximum fault repair time. That contractual guarantee is the real difference: a fault is a breach with a clock on it, not a best-efforts ticket.

• Final mile: dedicated fibre, uncontended
• Speed: symmetrical 100Mbps to 100Gbps
• SLA: formal, contractual uptime and repair times
• Typical leased line pricing: from £69/month for 100Mbps in a well-connected city centre, rising to £700+/month for the same speed in a rural location

If you want the full picture, our guide to what a leased line is breaks down install timelines, SLAs and where the cost goes.

How do FTTC, FTTP and leased lines compare?

For most buyers the decision comes down to five attributes: speed consistency, upload, SLA, cost and availability. Leased lines win on guarantees and symmetry; FTTP wins on value and reach; FTTC wins only on price and coverage. The table below is the at-a-glance version.

One in five (20%) UK businesses report insufficient internet speeds for their needs (Uswitch business broadband research) — almost always a contention or upload problem rather than a raw headline-speed one, which is exactly what moving up this table fixes.

Which fibre product is right for your business?

For most businesses under 20 users in a covered area, FTTP at 300Mbps or above now delivers performance that used to require a leased line. The cost gap is real — £60–£80/month for FTTP versus £300–£500/month for a leased line — and for straightforward cloud usage that extra spend is hard to justify. Start with FTTP and only step up when there is a concrete reason.

A leased line becomes the right call when you need guaranteed upload speeds, when you cannot tolerate extended outages and need a formal SLA, or when user count exceeds what a single FTTP line comfortably carries. For SMEs growing past 30–40 users, that threshold usually arrives within a few years of going fully cloud. If you run a multi-site estate, dedicated internet access and SD-WAN change the maths again.

AMVIA assesses current and anticipated usage against the cost and performance profile of each product before recommending one. One provider, security-first, Microsoft-certified — connectivity chosen to fit how your business actually works, not a single product pushed at every customer.

FTTC, FTTP or leased line — how do you check what is available?

Availability is postcode-specific. FTTP and leased-line options change street by street as Openreach and CityFibre build out, so the only reliable answer is a live check against every major UK network at your exact address. We compare all three product types side by side, with current pricing and availability, and tell you the realistic options — not just the cheapest headline.

If connectivity underpins phones as well as data, it is worth reading how upload and uncontended bandwidth affect call quality on our business VoIP pages before you choose. For pure data resilience, compare full-fibre broadband on the business broadband hub against a dedicated circuit.