UK Government Finally Adds “up to” on its 80Mbps Fibre Broadband Signs

A small but mildly comical change has been made in the Government’s publicity drive for the Broadband Delivery UK project. Somebody somewhere finally recognised that those big red and white “speed limit” signs, which are often used to highlight the top speed of 80Mbps for FTTC “fibre broadband” lines, needed an “up to” prefix.

The BDUK programme is currently working to make fixed line superfast broadband speeds of “greater than” 24Mbps (Megabits per second) available to 95% of the United Kingdom by 2017 and most of that work is being carried out by using BTOpenreach’s Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology.

Most of our regular readers will already know that FTTC is a distance dependant solution because it uses VDSL and existing copper lines between your local street cabinet and home / office to deliver the service. In other words, the quality and length of that copper line (i.e. how far you reside from the cabinet) can play a huge part in the services performance.

For example, some users at the furthest reaches of an FTTC line (very variable but nearing 2,000 metres) might only receive a handful of Megabits, while those who live much closer (very approximately less than 200 metres) may be able to receive closer to or exactly the services top headline speed of 80Mbps. Of course many other factors, such as your own home wiring, could still hinder that.

Despite this we have noted how politicians promoting the related BDUK deployments across the country have, until fairly recently, had a tendency to picture themselves holding a big round 80Mbps speed limit sign (aptly demonstrated in the picture above by comms minister Ed Vaizey MP). So it’s perhaps mildly entertaining to note that over the past few months, and after a few subtle prods, they’ve now started to add the necessary “up to” prefix 🙂 .

Mind you most ISPs know that they’re not strictly supposed to advertise the headline speed of FTTC due to the advertising watchdogs 10% performance rule (here), which means that in practice the providers tend to promote it as “up to” 76Mbps and the odd one uses “up to” 78Mbps.

Now don’t get us started on the whole calling a hybrid copper and fibre optic network “fibre broadband” thing again (here).