ROFL!

Found this on the BT Business web site about their so called "Fibre Broadband" service:

"The Fibre Hub is wireless and has the same functionality you're used to with the BT Business Hub. It has been enhanced to take the additional speed of Fibre. "

Wow! A VDSL modem/router that can cope with the multi-Gbps of traffic that can be provided over a fibre optic cable!

Just below that there is a link labelled:

"Find out more about the Fibre router"

I do wish that someone would point out to BT that their Fibre Broadband service is not (with VERY few exceptions) fibre to the home!!

Your quarm seems to be with them calling it Fibre, but I fail to see how it's not, admittedly it's FTTC but it's still Fibre.

Virgin have been claiming the Fibre tag for a while now.

Of course there is additional speed with FTTC, can't really see anything wrong there.

Fibre router is probably stretching it a little as it doesn't route any fibre optic cables.

Where does it stop I suppose, can you call ADSL Fibre, technically it's Fibre to the Exchange.

In any case I think we can be sure it isn't a modem/router. It will be a "cable" router connecting via ethernet to the Openreach modem just like the "fibre" Home Hub.

Virgin have been claiming the Fibre tag for a while now.

therein lies the problem, neither VM cable or BT FTTC connect to your equipment with fibre. In fact if you live within say 500m of your exchange you may have as much fibre in your ADSL connection as any faux fibre connection has.

It's called marketing - by and for idiots.

not by idiots....as it clearly works

their takeup is a bit poor really, though. Less than 25% of broadband customers despite being in 50% of population suggests they don't get over half their target market, despite the technological advantage of HFC.

About as fibre as virgin mate. I'm let to see a true large scale fibre deployment from a reputable ISP.

In reply to a post by yarwell:

their takeup is a bit poor really, though. Less than 25% of broadband customers despite being in 50% of population suggests they don't get over half their target market, despite the technological advantage of HFC.

The HFC part of VM's network is great. Its the IP side where they manage it to death is the problem.

If BE could use VM's HFC network to provide me a 100mbps service at £45/m, I would grab it in both hands. But I can only use VM as an ISP over the HFC - so my 15meg DSL service beats it for consistency hands down.

Maybe the other 25% know that

In reply to a post by jchamier:

The HFC part of VM's network is great. Its the IP side where they manage it to death is the problem.

I'm not convinced about that. Coax doesn't have infinite bandwidth. There's also the upstream frequency allocation issue that makes a decent upload rate difficult. It's a manageable problem but whether that's through draconian usage restrictions or splitting coax to add more nodes (reducing the number of modems per cable) is another matter. Guess which is cheaper

In reply to a post by Andrue:

In reply to a post by jchamier:

The HFC part of VM's network is great. Its the IP side where they manage it to death is the problem.

I'm not convinced about that. Coax doesn't have infinite bandwidth. There's also the upstream frequency allocation issue that makes a decent upload rate difficult. It's a manageable problem but whether that's through draconian usage restrictions or splitting coax to add more nodes (reducing the number of modems per cable) is another matter. Guess which is cheaper

DOCSIS 3 really makes a dramatic difference, witness the upload upgrades that VM have been carrying out. The 100m service has a 10m upload - if you can afford £45/m and put up with the traffic management, and no static IP.