New UK broadband upgrade could boost your home internet speeds

Broadband is the lifeblood of all our modern technology, communications, work, play and everything else thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones, laptops and all manner of connected devices. In recent years, the evolution from copper wire connections to fibre broadband has brought much faster connections into UK homes, but as long as those Wi-Fi connections to your devices are wireless, your speeds won't be as fast as possible.

One British broadband provider is recognising that by offering a new service that claims will bring "maximum performance" to any one chosen room in your home.

Community Fibre, a broadband provider serving every London borough, has introduced a new service it calls 'Fibre to your Room'. It aims to bring the best possible internet speeds to your chosen room, getting around the fact that many homes suffer from patchy Wi-Fi the further away you're sat from the router.

You usually can't decide where to put the Wi-Fi router as most homes have one point of entry into the property where the router must sit. This is often at the front of a house where the fibre cable has been connected to from the street.

It means you might have the router in your front room, but that could be quite far away from your bedroom or home study where you work, which could result in slower or patchy Wi-Fi speeds.

Fibre to your Room aims to change that. Open to new and existing customers for a one off fee of £75, Community Fibre will send an engineer to your home and run fibre cabling from where your router would normally have to sit, all the way through to the room you want the best internet connection in.

"Community Fibre's expert engineers will neatly and discreetly install fibre cables to help unlock speeds for more devices to game, work and stream," Community Fibre said. "The tidy, bespoke engineer installation is available for all new and existing customers, on all Community Fibre broadband packages and contract lengths, at a one-off £75 fee."

It means you can ask for the router to be in your study, allowing you to then plug an Ethernet cable directly into the router, achieving the fastest possible wired internet speeds, which will be faster than wireless Wi-Fi.

Community Fibre will run up to 40 metres of cable as part of the service. You might want to put it in the living room so you can plug your games console in directly for the best online gaming speeds, with the router also there to serve anyone using the TV to stream content or family members connected to the Wi-Fi on their phones or tablets.

"There may well be internal drilling (with a pencil-sized hole) if required to go from one room to another," Community Fibre said. "Any internal holes will be filled/fire stopped, as with the externally drilled hole. Garden rooms, garages, or outbuildings not attached to the main building will not be eligible for installation."

Community Fibre operates in London and owns and maintains its own fibre broadband network. It is in competition with BT and its Openreach network, which EE and many other brands tap into to provide internet connections to homes.