Nearly every broadband connection sold in India today is advertised as “fibre”. In a narrow sense that is usually true — there is fibre somewhere in the path. The question that decides what your connection actually feels like is a different one: where does the fibre stop, and what carries the signal the rest of the way?
Three ways to reach a building
Three access technologies dominate fixed-line internet, and they differ in the physical medium of the last stretch.
DSL: data over the telephone pair
DSL sends data over the same twisted pair of copper wires that carried landline telephony, using frequencies above the voice band. ADSL2+ tops out around 24 Mbps down and a few Mbps up. VDSL2 pushes considerably further — roughly 100 Mbps on a short loop with the common 17a profile, more with 35b — but only on a short loop. That qualifier is the whole story.
Cable: data over the television coax
Hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) networks run fibre to a neighbourhood node and coaxial cable from there into homes, carrying data with the DOCSIS family of standards. Coax handles far more bandwidth than a telephone pair, and DOCSIS 3.1 can deliver gigabit-class download speeds. The catch is structural: the coax segment beyond the node is a shared bus. Everybody on it draws from the same pool, and the spectrum plan historically allocated far more of it to downstream than upstream.
Fibre: data as light in glass
Optical fibre carries information as pulses of light down a strand of glass roughly the width of a human hair. It is not simply “faster copper”; it behaves differently in ways that matter.
Why distance destroys copper and not glass
An electrical signal on copper attenuates — it loses strength — and it attenuates worse at higher frequencies. Since bandwidth on DSL and coax comes from using higher frequencies, the usable capacity of a copper line falls off sharply with length. A VDSL2 line that syncs near 100 Mbps a couple of hundred metres from the cabinet may manage a fraction of that a kilometre away, on identical equipment. Nothing is broken; that is physics.
Single-mode optical fibre loses roughly 0.2 to 0.4 dB per kilometre at the wavelengths used for access networks. The practical consequence is that the difference between a subscriber 200 metres from the exchange and one 12 kilometres away is, for ordinary purposes, nothing at all. Two customers on the same fibre plan get the same line rate regardless of where in the city they sit.
Glass is also electrically inert. Copper acts as an antenna: it picks up interference from motors, lifts, poor earthing and nearby pairs (crosstalk), and it corrodes. Water ingress into a copper joint degrades the line; water ingress into a properly spliced fibre closure does comparatively little, because no current is flowing. In a city with a serious northeast monsoon, that distinction shows up in the fault statistics.
The FTTx alphabet, decoded
“Fibre” in marketing copy covers several architectures. The letters after FTT tell you where the glass ends:
- FTTH / FTTP — fibre to the home or premises. The glass terminates inside your flat or house, at an ONT (optical network terminal). No copper in the access path at all.
- FTTB — fibre to the building. Glass reaches the basement or riser of an apartment block; the last few tens of metres to each flat run over Ethernet or in-building copper. In a well-cabled building this is close to FTTH in practice.
- FTTC / FTTN — fibre to the cabinet or node. Glass reaches a street cabinet, and VDSL2 over the existing telephone pair covers the rest. Sold as fibre; performs like DSL, with all the distance sensitivity above.
If a plan is described as fibre and the installer connects your router to a telephone socket or a coaxial wall plate rather than to an optical terminal, you have FTTC or HFC, not FTTH. That is not necessarily a bad connection — but it is a different product, and it should not be priced as if it were the same one.
Honest caveat: most fibre is shared as well
Fibre is not automatically a private lane. The dominant residential architecture, GPON, is a passive optical network: one fibre leaves the exchange, hits an unpowered optical splitter, and fans out to many homes — commonly 32 or 64 of them. A GPON tree carries about 2.5 Gbps downstream and 1.2 Gbps upstream, and that capacity is shared across everyone on the splitter. Newer XGS-PON raises it to roughly 10 Gbps in both directions, still shared.
So FTTH removes the distance problem and the interference problem. It does not, by itself, remove the sharing problem. How many subscribers a provider puts behind a given amount of upstream capacity — its contention or oversubscription policy — is a separate decision, and it is the one that determines whether your line holds up at nine in the evening. That is worth understanding on its own: read how oversubscription actually works.
The alternative is point-to-point fibre — a dedicated strand or a dedicated wavelength from the exchange to one customer, with no splitter in between. It costs more to build and is typically how leased lines and dedicated business circuits are delivered.
Where the upload asymmetry comes from
DSL and DOCSIS both allocate spectrum asymmetrically by design — the “A” in ADSL literally stands for asymmetric — because early consumer internet was overwhelmingly a download activity. Fibre has no such physical constraint: a GPON or XGS-PON system can be provisioned symmetrically, and a point-to-point fibre trivially can. When a fibre plan still gives you a tenth of your download speed for uploads, that is a commercial choice about provisioning, not a limitation of the glass. Whether it matters to you depends on what you do: here is when upload speed becomes the number that decides everything.
What to actually ask a provider
- Does the fibre terminate at an ONT inside my premises?
- Is the plan symmetric, and if not, what is the upload figure?
- Is the connection GPON/XGS-PON (shared tree) or point-to-point? What is the contention policy?
- Is the drop into my building aerial or ducted, and who maintains it?
ValoNet builds FTTH — fibre terminating at the premises — with symmetric plans and a stated no-oversubscription policy across its residential and business services, and offers dedicated capacity up to 10 Gbps on the enterprise tier. The point of this article is not that one architecture is always right; it is that “fibre” on a banner tells you almost nothing, and four questions tell you almost everything.