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Cityfibre Suggest UK Broadband Worse than Internet on the Beach Abroad

Wednesday, Sep 5th, 2018 (5:33 pm) - Score 2,147

Fibre optic network builder Cityfibre has suggested via a new survey that people are likely to get “faster internet on the beach in your favourite holiday resort” than when you are trying to connect in the UK, although the survey doesn’t actually confirm that and the results are a mix of questionable interpretations.

Lately Cityfibre has been on somewhat of a largely noble crusade to right a few of the industry’s perceived wrongs, not least by arguing through the courts for an end to “deliberately misleading” uses of “fibre” terminology in ISP adverts for slower hybrid fibre services (i.e. instead of only using it alongside Gigabit capable pure fibre optic lines) and highlighting weaknesses in existing copper broadband networks.

In keeping with that the fibre builder has today claimed that holiday makers could be surprised to find that “uploading their favourite holiday snaps may take longer at home in the UK than it did at their summer holiday destination,” which appears to be at least partly based on a speedtest based study that was recently conducted by research group M-Lab and Cable.co.uk (here).

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The results then appear to have been mixed in (or up) with the feedback they received via a recent Censuswide survey of almost 3,500 UK residents (here and here).

Cityfibre’s Statement

The research calculated that around 31 million Brits plan to travel abroad this year, and shockingly, when looking at their top 10 destinations, only those planning to holiday in Italy and Greece would have a tougher time uploading photos than they would if they were in the UK.

This isn’t surprising when you look at the other findings uncovered in the survey. It found that over three quarters (78%) of UK consumers feel slowed down and frustrated by their internet connection, with the figure rising among homeworkers (82%) and young people (87%).

With the rise of remote working and working from home, it seems ironic to have faster internet on the beach in your favourite holiday resort than when you are trying to connect in the UK. Part of the reason we are lagging when it comes to poor broadband is the confusion between part fibre and full fibre created by misleading advertising, which has left many customers confused about their own connectivity.

While we support Cityfibre’s fight for more representative fibre promotions, we still at the same time have to call out a few obvious flaws in some of the interpretations they’re making. Firstly, the Cable.co.uk study was based on consumer speedtest based data and didn’t examine actual network availability (speedtest data is unreliable due to how it can be affected by slow WiFi, local network congestion, consumer package choice etc.).

Secondly, the survey report talks a lot about uploading photos, which overlooks the fact that the examples they quote and the study’s own data only published results in terms of average download speeds and not upload performance. Lest we forget that photos don’t usually need a particularly fast upload connection, especially if you’re saving to Facebook or similar social networks (those tend to downgrade / compress the quality).

Thirdly, the speedtest based research did not examine the specific performance of internet connectivity when on the beach, where you’ll only ever get online via a flaky 3G or 4G mobile data (mobile broadband) connection or weak hotel WiFi, as opposed to a fixed line (we’re pretty confident ISPs aren’t rolling out their cables to people randomly sitting on a beach). This won’t change with universal FTTP.

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Suffice to say that Cityfibre have the right intentions but their message risks being damaged by some of the more questionable interpretations of existing data being promoted in today’s press release. It’s perfectly possible to still make the right points and without taking the above approach.

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, BlueSky, Threads.net and .
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