Copper / Fibre bandwidth after FTTC arrives?

[iainH]

Our village's new cabinet is installed and we keenly await (yawn) the arrival of the fibre cable and some mains power to the cabinet, and many of us can't switch over fast enough to our providers' fibre products - I expect I will go with BT Infinity 2 as I have no complaints with my Business Account except poor speed and reliability of the existing copper connection.

However, I am being asked by others: "Will we see our speed improve if we choose not to take up our provider's fibre product?" i.e. unless they take some new product, will their bandwidth remain terrible?

How does it work? Will the existing copper cables still carry broadband traffic in addition to the new fibre cable (I assume so) and, if so, will "copper" broadband get any relief from less broadband "contention"?

I expect most users of this forum will have either moved over the fibre as soon as it was available and will not have noticed any improvement side-effects in bandwidth over the copper, but any real insight into this would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[DouglasDwyer]

This seems good information.

I am living in France where ADSL reigns and the copper lines are amazingly chaotic, often on the ground but broad band works.

Im moving back to Hatherleigh Devon where I have an 11km line to the exchange.

Im told that a new exchange  fibreoptic cabinet will be connected on the 5t August. Its suggested that the improvement due to the new  connection will mean that I wont have to pay thousands for poles to connect to another nearer exchange.

I made the decision to come back because I was told that I would have broadband by now.

How realistic is all this, I get no sense from BT and Open reache are as tight lipped as ever. , 

Doug Dwyer