The Managing Director (MD) of UK business ISP Fluidata, Piers Daniell, has questioned the legality and "apparent lack of education" concerning how some internet providers - BT and Virgin Media in particular - appear to misleadingly advertise "fibre optic" broadband when in fact the service itself might not actually be delivering that at all.


It's sadly all too easy to see where Piers is coming from. Take, for example, the new up to 40Mbps (2-10Mbps uploads) BT based Fibre-to-the-Cabinet technology. FTTC delivers a fast fibre optic cable to BT's street level cabinets, but the remaining connection (between cabinets and homes) is done using VDSL2 (similar to current ADSL broadband but faster over short distances) via existing copper cable.

Likewise Virgin Media does have fibre optic cable in its network, but it also uses a more traditional mix of copper and coax/coaxial cable for a not significant portion of that. Piers argues that promoting such services as fibre optic products can be very misleading for consumers, not least because a true fibre optic connection can offer the same speed in both directions (e.g. 100Mbps download and upload).


In fairness, Virgin Media uses a mixed variety of the latest DOCSIS cable standard(s), which is not directly comparable to ADSL like VDSL2 would be with the BT FTTC product. However the general point he makes is still quite fair.

Daniell also questions why the market regulator, Ofcom UK, has not got involved, especially given their apparent "hatred of miss selling in the industry". We suspect that the sometimes almost invisible nature of differing degrees of network infrastructure and related marketing like this would not be high on Ofcom's list.

Readers may recall that the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), with its well established inability to properly punish companies that ignore related rules, did in February 2009 uphold a similar complaint against several national press and direct mailing adverts for Virgin Media (here) .


Sadly the ASA's ruling was based more upon availability of the service than the structure of Virgin Media's infrastructure and whether or not it could justify advertising itself as "fibre optic". In fact the ASA did not even think to challenge this particular aspect, which suggests that little is likely to change in the future.

The term "Fibre Optic" is now apparently equal for all, regardless of whether the bulk of your connection is carried over a different form of cable or not.. it's all fibre. With that kind of loose definition we're surprised that mobile operators don't call themselves "mobile fibre optic broadband" providers because their primary network capacity is often provided by fibre optic lines too.