FTTB vs FTTH – What Do You Need For Your Business?
Fttb vs Ftth? What? More acronyms to get your head around.
Thankfully these are pretty simple, so let’s jump right in. This article is comparing FTTB vs FTTH to determine which is right for your business in terms of cost, speed and bandwidth.
Business Fibre (FTTB) and Fibre to the Home (FTTH) are, as you guessed, fibre internet connections. While essentially, these do the same thing, they are actually quite different in the areas where it matters most.
FTTB vs FTTH
What are the main differences between FTTB and FTTH?
Cost
Ah, of course, cost is an important factor and probably one of the first ones you considered.
FTTH is always going to be cheaper than business fibre – but then, you get what you pay for. In much the same way as a R2,500 notebook compares to a R15,000 MacBook, your business and home services offer very different results.
While we will go into this a little further down, one of the biggest contributors to cost is that many service providers offer an SLA on a business line which reduces downtime and offers speedy resolutions to any connectivity issues.
For a business, this is a necessity.
Speed
From a hardware perspective, FTTH is usually offered over technology which uses asynchronous line speed. Essentially this means that your upload and download speed are different, with your download speed being significantly faster.
In addition to this, a Gigabit Passive Optical Networks (GPON) which is the norm in FTTH connects up to 64 users on a single fibre. For home use, this is rarely a problem, as we’re not all online at the same time, and are only likely to experience a slow connection in the evening when our neighbours are on Netflix and their teenage kids are gaming.
In an office with 50 staff members who are all trying to access the internet at the same time, this will give rise to contention issues; slow connections, dropped calls, timed out access.
In this instance, an FTTB connection usually offers a full-duplex connection over two fibres. What does this mean in practical terms? It means you can expect a similar upload and download speed, as well as little to no contention. Therefore, the faster, more reliable and more efficient service which an office needs, is yours.
Bandwidth
Coming back to the issue of multiple users, you may find that your FTTH service offers a ‘best effort’ caveat. What they are saying is that they can offer a certain speed and a particular bandwidth, but they can’t guarantee it. There are simply too many mitigating factors at play to offer this kind of assurance.
Service providers can offer dedicated fibre lines into an office park or a commercial space which gives a business a fast connection and a great deal of capacity to carry the VoIP calls, access to the cloud, streaming video conferences and more.
What’s Best for Your Business?
When it comes to connectivity, we need to do our homework.
There are a lot of options available; multiple packages which may be sold to you as “all you need” or high-priced solutions touted as a future-proof connectivity solution.
What you need is the most cost-effective product which gives you all you need (and none of what you don’t) but which is scalable to match your business growth. This service needs to be provided by a national partner who you can trust, and who has been proven to provide a reliable and stable system for any sized business.
What you need, is Huge.
