The exchange that kept copper

Copper retirement is a national story with local footnotes. The footnotes are entire parishes. An exchange can be ‘in the programme’ and still take an FTTC order because the stop-sell date has not landed, the cabinet is an exception, or the fibre spine stops two lanes short of your pole. People then hear ‘Britain is full fibre’ and order a 24-month copper product as if that sentence were a socket.

Stop-sell is a date, not a mood

Openreach publishes a rolling list. Retailers are supposed to stop selling new copper products where FTTP is available and stop-sell has been declared. Where it has not, the old ladder still exists. That is how you can still be offered 80/20 in 2026.

The date can move. The exception can be your cabinet. Treat the list as a briefing, then confirm with an address check. National dashboards do not splice your drop.

Fibre, the adjective

Marketing still says fibre when it means ‘partly fibre’. FTTC is fibre to a green cabinet and copper for the last hundreds of metres. In rain, in a long lead-in, in a farm track, those metres are the product.

If the comparison table lists 67 Mbit download and 15–18 upload, you are usually looking at a cabinet. A 115/20 or a 500/100-ish is trying to tell you something else. Read the upload.

If you are stuck on the pair

You can still switch retailer on the same FTTC if that is all that exists. You can price FWA and satellite as a bridge. You can write to the operator about infill. What you should not do is sign a long copper term the week FTTP poles go up at the end of the lane.

Ask the gaining provider, in one sentence: is this FTTP to the premises? If they dodge, you already have the answer.

If the upload is still a teenager, the adjective ‘fibre’ is doing decorative work.

Copper will end. It has not ended everywhere. Buy the plant that exists, on a term that can survive the plant that is coming.