April Fool – Adverts Watchdog Starts “Real Fibre Optic” Campaign at the UN

The United Kingdom’s national telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has joined forces with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to formally support a new resolution at the United Nations that would require all countries in the world to adopt a single definition for “fibre optic broadband“.

The new resolution – ‘Real Fibre Optic‘ – aims to end years’ of confusion and disagreements by encouraging countries to officially recognise that a pure fibre optic broadband service can be delivered by any of the following connection or cable types: copper, aluminium, rope / string (only when attached and tightened between two cone shaped cardboard transceiver units), stainless steel and wireless.

The proposal, which is also supported by all of the UK’s biggest ISPs and several other national incumbent operators from across the world, saw a number of alternative network providers, telecoms experts and physicists voice concerns over why the new definition appeared to exclude the very optical fibre cables that the new policy is named after.

In response a spokesperson for the ASA, Michael Gove, said, “This resolution doesn’t change the current approach, which has already been widely adopted across the United Kingdom. People in this country have had enough of ‘experts’ and it’s high time we cleared up all the confusion they create.”

ASA Statement on the New Resolution:

“For years consumers have been confused by the various different definitions of fibre optic broadband and we’ve been working tirelessly to correct those errors.

So, from today and with the aid of a simple tweak, we aim to end all of that by expanding the definition so that it can apply to practically any type of Internet connection. This in turn will completely remove optical fibre from the equation and thus make it easier to understand.

Consumers can trust that they will no longer be confused because every ISP will be free to adopt the same terminology.”

Meanwhile Ofcom has supported the announcement and at the same time confirmed that 100% of the country was now covered by fibre optic broadband, thus completing the Government’s new “full fibre” national broadband strategy many years ahead of schedule and without any need for additional public funding.

“This has been the most cost effective deployments of new infrastructure that we’ve ever done and the aim now is to expand our approach into more areas where accurate definitions matter, such as healthcare, science, policing and education,” said a spokesperson for the Government. Australia is understood to be adopting a similar policy.

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UPDATE:

In case the hexadecimal code I added didn’t give it away, this was an April Fools 🙂 .