Earlier this month one of our suppliers, CityFibre, posted an interesting report about the confusion for consumers around ‘fibre’ connections. They commissioned a 3400 person broadband customer survey from Censuswide and following this, CityFibre are taking the advertising standard agency (ASA) to court. This is because the ASA stated that the use of the word ‘fibre’ is not a misleading term in broadband adverts when referring to connections that are a copper/fibre hybrid technology.
There are so many different types of Internet connections available nowadays, but the differences never seem to be truly explained to consumers so that they can fully understand what it is they’re paying for. This way of advertising has unfortunately become standard in the connectivity industry. We see the larger infrastructure providers, like BT Openreach and Virgin, referring to their connections as ‘fibre’ when they rely on copper cables to actually deliver it to the premises. The survey results stated that 24% of people thought they had fibre cables running to their premises, when in fact only 3% in the UK have this! Furthermore, 45% thought that connections described as ‘fibre’ meant there was fibre directly to their premises. This is not the case.
Unfortunately, due to the confusion surrounding fibre services, many business and home users may not appreciate there could be a full fibre option available to them, offering significantly higher bandwidths than FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) services can. CityFibre say ‘This confusion could mean that consumers miss out on the benefits of full fibre, damaging demand and so undermining the industry’s ability to reach the Chancellor’s target of national full fibre coverage by 2033. Any delay to the full fibre rollout risks the UK’s ability to compete in a global digital economy.
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