The BT owned ISP Plus Net has begun its trial of BT’s fast fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) with the first customer achieving speeds of 77 Mbps download and 15 Mbps upload. The customer also reported a 100% stable connection via the company’s blog.

The customer from Milton Keynes is the first in a trial of about a dozen to receive the blisteringly fast internet service with 40,000 houses participating in the BT Wholesale experimental service. Other areas to benefit include Leeds and Bournemouth where a provider is rolling out FTTC lines to multi-tenanted offices.

Unlike DSL, FTTC does not use any copper. An engineer will connect fibre from the cabinet directly into the home, preventing the distance based degradation of signal often experienced with copper connections.

Almost all current land-based broadband services use copper in some way or the other. ADSL is the classic example – broadband is delivered over decade-old phone lines, the quality of which can have a big impact on the service. Even BT’s current fibre service uses copper from the street corner box to the home, and so does Virgin Media broadband.

Rivals for the FTTC service include Virgin Media broadband and BT Infinity, both of which use fibre to the street corner but who uses copper from the street corner to the home. Virgin Media broadband currently offers 50 Mbps services but plans to roll out 100 Mbps speeds later this year. Virgin Media broadband is not really affected by copper quality, because of the better structure of cable wires, so FTTC is not essential for Virgin Media broadband to offer exceptional speeds.