IPUrbia

Techdirt recently ran a short piece about a new Cablevision ad campaign claiming to have “the most advanced fiber-optic network”, despite the fact that they are running fiber to the node, and the last mile is coax. Verizon, wanting to differentiate its fiber-to-the-home FIOS, is labelling the commercials “hogwash” and potentially false advertising.

Techdirt was a little critical of such advertising, arguing that, instead of “wasting all that time arguing over who could claim who had the best network, they could have been investing all that money in… I don’t know… improving the quality of those networks”.

I’m a little confused as to why Techdirt is critical of such advertising, because it, in the end, encourages networks to compete on actual tangibles. However, it does have a measure of ridiculousness to it–Comcast has recently been running advertisements touting “up to 12x faster than DSL“, despite the fact that BellSouth/AT&T (the incumbent in the area) offers DSL service that is comparable to Comcast’s best offering. As I noted before, similar advertisements will become much more common as AT&T’s next generation speeds of 6-8 Mb/s becomes very dated against the competition’s next-generation network rollouts.

There are some interesting problems here, though, from a customer education standpoint. There is a wireless provider in Texas that advertises “Wireless DSL” which, although completely impossible from a technical standpoint, is brilliant from a customer communication standpoint. Cablevision’s ad for the “most advanced fiber-optic” network is also interesting, since, although fiber has all of the glamour these days, it won’t deliver faster last-mile access for the next few years, at least.* Is it wrong to mislabel the technology if the communication about actual performance is the same? In technical circles, perhaps, but in dealing with a generally technically unsavvy mass market, I’m not so sure.

* Quick explanatory note on fiber versus coax. Fiber does have a much greater potential capacity than coax. Nevertheless, DOCSIS 3 delivers 100Mb/s, and, according to my friends in the know on cable engineering, much greater speeds over coax are possible. Most of the details, however, do favor fiber–coax is a shared medium, which can be a problem. Also, coax will always struggle to deliver meaningful upstream bandwidth, due to technical limitations. Nevertheless, while a built-from-scratch network would be smart to use fiber, cable companies with a heavy investment in coax networks are set for the foreseeable future.