I am fed up with the apparent lack of education when it comes to our national broadband networks. Call me old fashioned but I believe in a world where what you sell is what you get and that calling something you are selling one thing but delivering another is surely illegal? So why do the majority of consumer internet providers, namely Virgin and BT, believe it is ok to tell consumers they are buying fibre technology when, in fact they aren’t.
We have been selling fibre to businesses for many years and know all the heartache that comes with planning consents, excess charges and slipping deadlines. You aren’t telling me that somehow Virgin is managing to bring on thousands of customers a day to its 50 Mb/s fibre product without these complications? And why too are their services not symmetrical (ie same speed up and down the line), when fibre delivered to a business premise is – and hence the main driver for having it?
The reason is because the actual cable coming into your house is actually copper. With BT it is your phone line (even with the new and advance ‘Infinity’ product) and Virgin coaxial cable. So the only fibre you are getting is to the cabinet at the end of the street rather than to your actual home. So surely they can’t then tell you that you are getting the ‘power of fibre’ or so on? Yes it is faster but only because they have shorten the distance of the copper, but the delivery is no different to that of ADSL where the cable is just longer going back to the telephone exchange. From here the network is, and for a very long time, have been fibre supporting high levels of bandwidth.
Surely with Ofcom’s apparent hatred of miss selling in the industry, such as broadband speeds, they should be bringing this nonsense to an end?
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