FTTH or FTTO: which fibre should your business choose?
Both are called fibre, yet they offer very different services. The real deciding factor is not speed, it is what happens when the line goes down.
FTTH is shared fibre: fast and affordable, but with no guaranteed repair time and a reduced upload speed. FTTO is dedicated fibre with a contractual repair commitment and symmetrical speeds. The deciding factor is not the advertised speed but the downtime the business can absorb, and the volume of data it sends out.
Both offers are called "fibre", and the price gap often goes up to a factor of five. The difference is not in the advertised speed but in two lines of the contract that nobody reads before the first outage.
What really sets them apart
| FTTH | FTTO | |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | Shared between several subscribers | Dedicated to your site |
| Download speed | High | High |
| Upload speed | Much lower than download | Same as download |
| Repair | Best effort, no commitment | Contractual commitment with a stated time |
| Fixed IP address | Depends on the offer | Always |
| Monthly cost | Low | Significantly higher |
Upload speed, the forgotten criterion
Offers are sold on download speed. Yet a business spends its time sending: backups to the cloud, video calls, large files to clients, remote access to its own server.
On FTTH, upload is often a fraction of download. A nightly backup that runs over into the morning, or a video call where people struggle to hear you while you hear them perfectly, almost always comes down to this.
How to decide
Ask yourself three questions, in this order.
- How many hours of downtime can the business absorb? If the answer is "a few hours at most", FTTH on its own is ruled out.
- What happens if your teams cannot work for two days? That is the order of magnitude of an FTTH repair without commitment, in a sparsely populated area.
- How much data goes out every day? Backups, video calls, transfers: if the volume is significant, upload speed becomes the first criterion.
The third way
The choice is not binary. FTTH backed by a 4G/5G wireless link, with automatic failover, often costs less than FTTO and covers the main risk: prolonged downtime.
This setup does not suit every site. It requires decent mobile coverage on site, and it does not replace FTTO when constant upload speed is the constraint. But for an SME whose main fear is being stuck for two days, it better meets the real need.
Frequently asked questions
- Is FTTO faster than FTTH?
- Not necessarily in download speed. The difference lies in upload speed, which matches download speed on FTTO, and above all in the repair commitment. You are paying for a service guarantee, not for extra speed.
- Can I keep FTTH and still protect my business against outages?
- Yes, by adding a second connection over a different infrastructure, typically a 4G/5G link, and a router able to switch over automatically. The condition is that the two links share neither the same connection point nor the same physical path.
- From what company size is FTTO justified?
- Size is not the right criterion. An eight-person business whose entire activity runs through hosted software needs a repair commitment more than a sixty-person business working on local files.
Next step
Sources
Published 5 September 2026 · Équipe Skill Group, Télécom & réseaux
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