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Will the Real Fibre Optic Broadband Service Please Stand Up

Wednesday, Jan 2nd, 2013 (6:30 am) - Score 49,705

Both FTTC and FTTN are perfectly acceptable solutions and often do deliver superfast broadband speeds but they’re by no means as future proof or capable as a true fibre optic service. FTTC in particular is aggressively distance dependent, which means that those who live furthest from their street cabinet will receive significantly slower speeds (down to around a minimum of just 5Mbps at its furthest reach on BT’s lowest fault level). You won’t see Gigabits from a long FTTC line but those who live closest to the cabinet might be able to receive around 100Mbps (what seems fast today will be slow tomorrow).

Similarly Virgin Media’s network, which is perhaps closer to FTTN, still uses a lot of coaxial cable and some copper to reach homes. This is a more capable setup than FTTC but suffers from some of the same problems and cannot technically be described as truly fibre optic (emphasis on the word “truly”).

NOTE: BT’s website does at least refer to its BTInfinity service as “fibre-based broadband” on several pages, which is at least technically accurate.

Conclusion

It’s been almost 12 years since Eminem’s legendary hip hop songThe Real Slim Shady” first graced our ears and we’re still finding uses for its clever play on words. Eminem’s rap was a critique of manufactured pop songs that were being churned out at the time and in many ways this echoes in the abuse of terms like “fibre optic”.

ISP marketing departments clearly recognised early on that calling a broadband service “superfast” or “ultrafast” wasn’t good enough, not least because providers have been describing internet services as superfast ever since the days of dialup. So it’s entirely understandable that they would choose “fibre optic” as the new term to separate old from new.

But if history is anything to go by then marketing departments, for good or ill, will invariably win these arguments. ISPs also benefit from the use of a common language; it’s simple, clear and who doesn’t know that the speed of light is fast? Really fast! The problem is that FTTC and FTTN only run at full fibre optic speeds up to a certain point, which is often some distance from your home, and thus the service cannot match a true fibre optic line.

Critics would also say that if FTTC is “fibre optic” then why not apply the same terminology to ADSL2+, Satellite, WiFi or even Mobile Broadband? After all, at some point, nearly everything will need to transmit a service over fibre optic cables (i.e. transatlantic undersea cables). Certainly that would make the government’s job a lot easier.

As it stands everybody from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to the government has now accepted the use of “fibre optic” alongside services that often can’t deliver a full fibre solution. As a result the battle for sanity has arguably already been lost, which only serves to muddy the waters for those ISPs that do offer true fibre optic connectivity (e.g. IFNL, Hyperoptic, B4RN, BTInfinity [FTTP Package], KC etc.).

May I have your attention please?
May I have your attention please?
Will the real Fibre Optic Line please stand up?
I repeat, will the real Fibre Optic Line please stand up?
We’re gonna have a problem here..

End.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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