ISP Swish Fibre and BT Lock Horns Over Fake Fibre Advertising

Alternative UK ISP Swish Fibre, which is deploying its own Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, has accused BT of trying to censor (via a complaint to the advertising watchdog) its own tongue-in-cheek campaign that attempted to highlight the “misleading practice of promoting speed-sapping copper-mix services as ‘Fibre broadband’.”

Swish launched its advertising campaign back in July (here), which saw them place a number of large billboard sized posters around the country (pictured – top). The posters “playfully” tried to set their own full fibre broadband service apart by using the “Fake Fibre” phrase to call out significantly slower and less reliable part-fibre services (e.g. FTTC / VDSL2) – these still use old copper lines on the final run from cabinets to homes.

However, Swish has now changed the approach of their public awareness campaign in order to circumvent an attempt by rival BT to halt its message, which occurred after the telecoms giant lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) over the altnet’s “Fake Fibre” phrasing.

At the time of writing, the ASA has yet to rule on or publish exact details of BT’s complaint, although Swish has opted to see this more as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. As such, the alternative network provider has launched a new take on their poster campaign, which introduces the word “Censored” (see below) as a way of alluding to BT’s resistance to its earlier “Fake Fibre” messaging.

Alistair Goulden, CMO of Swish Fibre, said:

“We’ve all grown to understand the various types of fruit juices available on the market due to the introduction of national legislation and clear labelling. But where it’s easy to differentiate from a 100% pure pressed fruit juice and a concentrated alternative, these helpful rules sadly don’t apply to broadband products.

Today, broadband providers are free to promote their products as ‘Fibre Broadband’, even when the product is infused with a significant amount of copper cable across the last leg of the journey into the home.

Unlike Full Fibre broadband that only uses 100% fibre-optic cable at all times, these ‘Part Fibre’ products contain a different mix of ingredients that produce significantly inferior performance results for households. We believe that the ability to conveniently gloss over this with the word ‘Fibre’ is hugely damaging to consumer awareness and purchasing decisions.”

In fairness, Swish’s original campaign did suffer from the one particular problem, it didn’t do a great job of defining “Fake Fibre” in its posters, which we previously remarked could make it difficult for regular consumers to understand the differences. As a result, some people may incorrectly end up viewing the term as extending to rival FTTP ISPs too, which won’t hurt Swish but risks wider confusion.

On top of that, it’s worth remembering how even some hybrid fibre networks can still deliver multi-gigabit speeds, such as with Virgin Media’s HFC DOCSIS 3.1 network upgrade or the part of Hyperoptic’s deployments that involve Fibre-to-the-Building (FTTB) rather than FTTP. Once you consider these, then the debate over fibre advertising can become more complex.

We should add that the Gigabit Take-Up Advisory Group (GigaTAG) recently recommend (here) that Ofcom consider the adoption of a “gigabit-ready” style kite mark (labelling system) for UK broadband packages which, if done correctly, could help to resolve some of the consumer confusion that does tend to exist around this debate.