Do You Have Full Fibre Broadband? A Third of UK Consumers Don’t Know

A recent YouGov survey of 2,033 UK adults, which was commissioned by Point Topic and conducted online during November 2022, has revealed that 35.5% of respondents were still unsure as to whether their home broadband ISP connections were based off “full fibre” (FTTP/B/H) technology or not.

In simple terms, a full fibre connection is one that sends a light signal (laser) down an optical fibre cable  – made of glass or plastic – directly to your home. The benefits of this approach include significantly faster and more stable speeds (possibly into Terabits further down the road – at the domestic level), greater reliability, faster latency times, energy efficiency, lower maintenance costs and so forth.

However, numerous broadband ISPs also spent the best part of the previous decade selling slower “part-fibre” or “hybrid-fibre” (e.g. FTTC / VDSL2, G.fast, Hybrid Fibre Coax) solutions as “fibre broadband” products, which is one of the reasons why so many people continue to be confused about the terminology today (i.e. if you think you’ve got it already, then you may be less likely to contemplate an upgrade).

Admittedly, even Point Topic could be said to be muddying the waters here, since their own definition of “full fibre” includes Fibre-to-the-Building (FTTB) connections. The tricky thing about FTTB, which has in the past been used to hook-up apartment blocks, is that the last few metres into individual flats / apartments may be carried over either fibre or a copper line (often coax). But FTTB and FTTP/H are usually spoken of in the same breath as, in the real-world, there’s rarely much of a noticeable performance difference between them (at least for today’s 1Gbps needs).

Lest we also forget Virgin Media’s promotion of their old Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) based DOCSIS network as a “fibre” service, although in fairness that standard can deliver multi-gigabit download speeds. But upload performance is a different matter, at least in the UK, and at the end of the day it’s not true end-to-end fibre (VMO2 are now replacing HFC with XGS-PON FTTP).

At this point we could continue on to highlight the various perceived historic failings of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), and others, in failing to tackle such confusion earlier on (example). But most of our readers will already be familiar with that and we don’t want to rehash an old debate too much.

However, what Point Topic’s survey doesn’t tell us is whether the failure to understand “full fibre“, at least in terms of the customers’ perception of their own home connection, has actually had a major negative impact upon the take-up of faster broadband speeds via full fibre packages. At the end of the day, most consumers seem to pick a package based more on a combination of price, speed and quality than specific technology.

Nevertheless, it’s worth remebering that in 2021 the Gigabit Take-Up Advisory Group (GigaTAG) proposed several changes (here) to the Government and Ofcom, which were aimed at helping to boost the take-up of gigabit-capable broadband services. One of those included clearer labelling of broadband packages to help consumers understand the differences. But after nearly two years, there still hasn’t been much movement on that.