Broadband News
News, views and analysis
There's only one company doing coax broadband
06 Feb 2009 | 00.40 Europe/London
The Advertising Standards Authority have ruled against Virgin Media in response to complaints from Sky and a member of the public. Finally the regulator has addressed some aspects of the approach taken by VM to marketing its broadband as technically superior which to many looked like either dumbing down or intentional misleading of the public.
Virgin Media's cable broadband, available to under 50% of UK homes, is delivered using a shared coaxial cable originally conceived as a means of distributing television signals. CATV or Common Aerial TV is a technology that may supply a street or so with signals down one cable with individual subscribers teed off the common cable. The frequency spectrum available in the cable is wide and it is confided to devices connected to the cable, so it doesn't suffer the same bandwidth issues as mobile phone or wireless broadband. One difference between this approach and telephone line broadband is the sharing of the one cable in a street, as opposed to individual phone lines going back to an exchange.
VM's creativity in presenting their metal coaxial cable as "fibre optic" unfortunately still seems to find some acceptance with the ASA as they refer in their adjudication to "fibre optic broadband" on a number of occasions. Anything that confuses a length of coax with an optical fibre should be in the "Dumb Britain" column of Private Eye.
VM's network may well have fibre optics to a street cabinet with the final few hundred metres of shared coaxial cable, whereas ADSL over the phone line has individual lines to the telephone exchange that can be up to 6 km or longer. In both cases the next step is a fibre optic connection to either the street cabinet or the telephone exchange. A coaxial cable is better than an unshielded twisted pair for high frequency signals and this combines with the shorter length to give VM an advantage in terms of potential speed, but fibre it is not.
We would expect to see more enthusiastic advertising and complaints in this area as the market share of VM's cable product has long buckled under competitive pressure from ADSL. If just under 50% of the population have access to cable broadband and that broadband was highly superior one would expect to see 8m cable broadband users rather than the reality which is less than 4m.
Virgin Media's cable broadband, available to under 50% of UK homes, is delivered using a shared coaxial cable originally conceived as a means of distributing television signals. CATV or Common Aerial TV is a technology that may supply a street or so with signals down one cable with individual subscribers teed off the common cable. The frequency spectrum available in the cable is wide and it is confided to devices connected to the cable, so it doesn't suffer the same bandwidth issues as mobile phone or wireless broadband. One difference between this approach and telephone line broadband is the sharing of the one cable in a street, as opposed to individual phone lines going back to an exchange.
VM's creativity in presenting their metal coaxial cable as "fibre optic" unfortunately still seems to find some acceptance with the ASA as they refer in their adjudication to "fibre optic broadband" on a number of occasions. Anything that confuses a length of coax with an optical fibre should be in the "Dumb Britain" column of Private Eye.
VM's network may well have fibre optics to a street cabinet with the final few hundred metres of shared coaxial cable, whereas ADSL over the phone line has individual lines to the telephone exchange that can be up to 6 km or longer. In both cases the next step is a fibre optic connection to either the street cabinet or the telephone exchange. A coaxial cable is better than an unshielded twisted pair for high frequency signals and this combines with the shorter length to give VM an advantage in terms of potential speed, but fibre it is not.
We would expect to see more enthusiastic advertising and complaints in this area as the market share of VM's cable product has long buckled under competitive pressure from ADSL. If just under 50% of the population have access to cable broadband and that broadband was highly superior one would expect to see 8m cable broadband users rather than the reality which is less than 4m.