Dropping fibre to return to copper

So, if I have fibre with supplier 'A' and I decide to leave them for supplier 'B', and opted for ordinary broadband, would they actually remove the fibre cable and reinstate copper? If not, would I continue to get fibre type speeds or would it return to copper speed?

'They' will disconnect the ties in the street cabinet, removing the link from your copper pair to the fibre DSLAM.
Once done you will get ADSL speeds as it will be an ADSL service.

In reply to a post by fletch1508:

would they actually remove the fibre cable and reinstate copper?

You misunderstand how 'fibre broadband' is provisioned. It does not involve removing any copper. Quite the opposite in fact. An additional loop of copper links your line at its original termination point in the old cabinet to the new cabinet and then back again. So for the duration of your FTTC service your telephone line is actually a few metres longer. When your service is cancelled this extra loop of copper is disconnected and your telephone line reverts back to its original (shorter) length.

The magic of 'fibre broadband' is that the DSL signal is processed in the new cabinet and the resulting digital data sent down (or received from) a separate fibre link. This only happens to the DSL frequencies. The lower voice frequencies travel to the new cabinet and come back completely unaltered other than being very slightly delayed by a few extra metres of copper.

Edited by Andrue (Mon 09-Nov-15 20:57:46)

Who is supplier A? A BT Openreach FTTC/FTTP supplier, or Virgin Media cable?

If it's a BT Openreach service, is it FTTC or FTTP?

Diagram

Above is a diagram which explains BT Fibre

and the Jumpers that link the FTTC to your phone line are only active when FTTC is active.
So if you go back to ADSL an engineer will come along and put it back as it used to be without the "Tie" in the line.
Because for ADSL to work on a line that has had FTTC the Tie/Jumper needs to be removed as this is what inserts the VDSL signals and removes ADSL signals that are coming from the exchange. VIA a filter in the FTTC Cabinet.

A relevant post on the link below backing me up on this.

PCP Wiring FTTC

Morning Tom

Whilst that Diagram is generally good, the "Tie Cable" should either be annotated that it includes extensions for both D and E sides; or there should be a second "Tie Cable" from the E end of the PCP to the FTTC.

Acknowledging that it is not your omission; but the source of that Diagram.

Yes, I do agree it should show that,
And in theory I think that the filters should be in the primary PCP, so all the FTTC cabinet has is one pair coming from it to the PCP, which would mean that the line is not so dependent upon the FTTC and its permissions to be opened etc.. to potentially diagnose faults and reduce errors

Because to provision FTTC the engineer has to divert a line, find it, join/filter it, then send it back to the pcp, Find it, Test it, Join it,
whereas if it was purely from the FTTC all the lines could be pre-linked and ready to use in the PCP, so upon installation a port can be remotely allocated and activated in the Cabinet and a pair is ready to use in the PCP, so an engineer can come along, apply a filter to the E side, and join the FTTC up via Jumpers to the existing line re-join to exchange, test and all is done,

No fiddling in the FTTC Cabinet, so you don't need so many FTTC engineers to come out of their hiding places.

There is no need to touch the FTTC cabinet to make end user connections. When the tie cable is installed, the inputs and outputs from the DSLAM ports are presented on blocks in the PCP. This is why some PCP need a reshell - to give the necessary space for these blocks.

To connect a customer to FTTC, the engineer removes the direct jumper between E side and D side and jumpers the E side cable to the input to the filter on the allocated FTTC port. He/she then jumpers the D side cable to the output of the FTTC port. The ports are allocated remotely, as you suggest.


I'll leave it to someone else to give a more terminologically precise explanation.