SoGEA vs FTTP for Business: Which Should Your Phone Lines Move To?

Quick answer

If FTTP (full fibre) is available at your address, take it. It is faster, far better on upload, more reliable, and - critically - it is the network Openreach is keeping. SoGEA is a perfectly good product and the right answer when full fibre has not reached you yet, but it still runs over copper for the final stretch, which means it is on a clock of its own. Choosing SoGEA where FTTP exists usually means doing this migration twice. Price is rarely the deciding factor, because the two are closer than people expect. Availability is.

Once you accept that your phone service is moving onto your internet connection, the connection stops being an IT purchase and becomes part of your phone system. That changes how you should judge it: upload matters more than you thought, reliability matters more than peak speed, and how long the product itself will exist matters most of all. This guide compares the two options you will actually be offered, and is fairly blunt about when SoGEA is a sensible interim and when it is a wasted install. If you want us to check what is genuinely available at your postcode, get a no-obligation quote and we will tell you both what you can have and what we would recommend.

What each one actually is

SoGEA stands for Single Order Generic Ethernet Access, which tells you nothing useful. In practice it is the same FTTC-style broadband many businesses already have - fibre to a street cabinet, copper for the last stretch into your building - sold as a standalone product with no analogue phone line bundled in. It exists precisely because of the switch-off: it made no sense to keep selling broadband welded to a phone line that was being retired. Our SoGEA explainer covers it in more depth.

FTTP (Fibre to the Premises), or full fibre, runs a fibre-optic cable all the way to your building. There is no copper in the path, so distance from the cabinet stops mattering, and the speeds available are an order of magnitude higher. It also carries no phone line, for the same reason - see what full fibre means for your phone lines.

Both leave you needing a separate voice service. That is not a gap in the product; it is the whole architecture of the all-IP world.

Head to head

Figures above are guide ranges as at August 2026 and vary by address, package and provider.

The specification nobody checks: upload

Businesses judge broadband on the download number because that is what gets advertised. For a business whose phones now run over it, upload is the number that matters.

Everything you send out competes for that upload: each concurrent call, every video meeting, cloud backups, sending large files, remote access, and - increasingly - your alarm signalling and card terminal. A voice call is not bandwidth-hungry on its own, using roughly 100 kbps in each direction as a rule of thumb, so ten concurrent calls is around 1 Mbps of upload. That sounds trivially small against even SoGEA's upload, and in isolation it is.

The problem is contention rather than capacity. On an asymmetric connection with perhaps 15-20 Mbps of upload, one person uploading a large video file or a backup kicking off mid-afternoon can consume most of it, and voice is the traffic that suffers first and most visibly - calls break up while nothing else appears to be wrong. This is by far the most common cause of "our VoIP is unreliable", and it is a connection problem rather than a phone problem. Our guide to internet speed for VoIP covers the detail, and common VoIP problems covers the symptoms.

Two consequences. On SoGEA, quality-of-service configuration to prioritise voice traffic is not optional - it is what makes the difference between a service that works and one that annoys everybody. On FTTP the headroom is usually generous enough that the problem does not arise, and symmetric packages remove it entirely.

Availability is what actually decides this

For all the comparison above, most businesses do not really have a choice to agonise over. Either FTTP has reached your address or it has not.

• FTTP available: take it. There is no realistic scenario in which SoGEA is the better long-term decision at an address where full fibre already exists.
• FTTP not available: SoGEA is the right answer now, and it is a genuinely good product. Take it, and check availability again when your contract comes up.
• FTTP available but only from an alternative network: worth comparing. Altnets often price aggressively and build well, but check the contract length, the service level and what happens if you want to move providers later.

If you have several sites, expect a mixed picture - a head office on full fibre and a depot on SoGEA is completely normal. Plan for both rather than trying to standardise, which is one of the themes in migrating multi-site and multi-line businesses.

Price: closer than you would guess

People assume full fibre carries a large premium. On business packages the gap is often modest, and sometimes there is no gap at all, because providers are actively steering customers onto the network they intend to keep. It is entirely common to find an entry-level FTTP package priced against a comparable SoGEA one.

Where FTTP does cost more is at the top end, where you are buying much higher or symmetric speeds - but that is buying a better product, not paying a fibre tax. And there can be a one-off install charge where fibre has to be brought into the building, particularly on older or awkward premises.

Set against that, both products remove the copper line rental you were paying, which is the saving that funds this whole exercise. Legacy line rental has risen steeply through 2026 - see the WLR price rises - so the comparison to make is against your current bill, not last year's.

The honest catch: SoGEA is also on a clock

This is the part that tends not to feature in sales conversations, and it is the main reason I would not install SoGEA where FTTP exists.

SoGEA still depends on the copper between the cabinet and your building. Openreach is not just retiring the analogue phone service - it is retiring the copper network itself, over a longer timescale. The same exchange-level programme that stopped copper sales as full fibre coverage passed roughly 75% applies to SoGEA too, which is why in well-served areas SoGEA is already unavailable to order. Our Openreach stop-sell guide explains how that mechanism works.

So a SoGEA install today, at an address where FTTP is already available, buys you: a connection that is slower on upload than it needed to be, on a product that will require migrating again, at a site where the better option was sitting there the whole time. Nobody makes that choice deliberately - it happens when a provider quotes the product they find easiest to deliver and the customer has no reason to question it. Asking "is FTTP available here?" as a direct question is the whole defence.

Where FTTP genuinely is not available, none of this applies. SoGEA is the correct answer, it will be supported for years yet, and it carries voice perfectly well. Take it without worrying, and revisit at renewal.

Whichever you choose, plan for these

1. Power. Neither connection works in a power cut without help. A UPS on the router, plus automatic divert of calls to mobiles, covers the realistic scenarios - see landline resilience and failover.
2. Failover. If phones, card payments and alarm signalling will all share this connection, 4G or 5G failover stops one fault becoming three.
3. Voice prioritisation. Essential on SoGEA, sensible on FTTP.
4. Lead times. Order connectivity early. It is on the critical path for everything else in your migration, as our switch-off deadline guide sets out.

The bottom line

This is a shorter decision than it looks. Ask one question - is FTTP available at this address? If yes, take it: better upload, more headroom for voice, fewer failure modes, and it is the network that is being kept. If no, take SoGEA with a clear conscience, configure voice prioritisation properly, and look again when your term ends. Either way, budget for a UPS and think about 4G failover, because you are about to make your phones, and possibly your alarm and your card terminal, dependent on this one connection.

We can check what is actually available at your postcode - including alternative networks - and price the connectivity and the voice service together: get a no-obligation quote or call 0333 006 9399.

Getting unknown calls on a business line? Our free UK phone number checker shows which network or provider Ofcom allocated any number to, and whether the range is in service — no sign-up.