Truth, Lies and Broadband, Part 1: 'Cable'

IanFogg | August 16, 2007, 11:57 AM

This is going to be the first in a few entries on ISPs' wild and confusing claims for their broadband service....

First up are the European cable companies that are jumping on the fibre bandwagon and implying that their service is similar/the same as the fibre to the home (FTTH) services launching in France and elsewhere.

Background: traditional cable networks use HFC technology which stands for hybrid fibre coax. In simple terms what this means is: Fibre runs to near the consumer's home -- like a street cabinet -- and then a copper core coax cable runs down each road with branches into customer homes. The coax is shared capacity for broadband: the more capacity one house uses the less there is for neighbours.

Several European cable operators are now using the word 'fibre' rather too prominently in their corporate backgrounders, investors beware, and even in the case of Virgin Media in their consumer marketing. Virgin's current poster campaign proclaims:

Truth, Lies and Broadband

Hello,

There are lots of companies out there selling 'high speed' broadband, claiming to be the fastest and cheapest in the land.

The truth is this... right now, in terms of broadband, there are two types of home in the UK.

Half of us can get cable broadband. This is delivered via a fibre optic cable -- meaning it is officially the fastest and the best performing broadband available.

[My emphasis. It goes on in a similar vein.]

The key word in the above text is "via".

This usage of the word 'fibre' is highly misleading and confusing. The service of ADSL broadband consumers will also go via fibre at some point, typically from the telephone exchange onwards, so what's the actual difference??? Also, unlike cable's HFC, ADSL uses uncontended (ie unshared) copper between the consumer and the telephone exchange, unlike cable's shared coax running around the street. So, although telephone line quality and distance matter for ADSL there are some advantages for ADSL over HFC.

Bottom line: The most important bottleneck for broadband performance today, is not the technology that delivers the connection to a house, but the overall network capacity that ISPs allow throughout their network. And, as ISPs are cutting consumer broadband prices, they have less incentive to invest in such network capacity.

Going back to Virgin, briefly, their earlier radio advertising campaign was even worse:

You can now get Virgin Broadband for just £10 a month and it's not just any old broadband. It's unlimited super duper fast fibre-optic cable broadband or in other words broadband that doesn't use copper wire like most providers and doesn't slow down no matter how far you live from the telephone exchange.

Arghhh.

In my opinion, the word via is not enough to fix the message from the July radio adverts for the current print campaign and make the message clear. The word via just results in:

Truth, Lies, Ambiguities and Broadband

The current Virgin Media poster: