What percentage of UK homes have the facility for fibre-optic broadband?

Question

You hear about these Virgin Media adverts but how many people can actually get "The Mother of all Broadband"?

Answer 1

Virtually none. At the moment (with the exception of a trial in Bournemouth), all UK homes are still using copper. You can request a fibre service, but you will also incur the cost of piping the fibre to you (in the thousands).

The Virgin advert is slightly miss-leading. Pratically all the backbone connections in the UK are fibre, and are shared by all main ISP's in the country. Virgin inherited NTL's network which is much newer then BT's fibre\copper network, so technically it's using a better fibre, but it's not noticable to the average user. In 3 - 5 years time, all ISP's will have fibre to the home.