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Author Topic: With data travelling at light speed, fibre means ultrafast [sic] downloads  (Read 1348 times)

Weaver

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Quote from a BT advert for FTTP
    “With data travelling at light speed, fibre means ultrafast [sic] downloads”

Marketing cobblers, unbelievably ignorant. I don’t even know where to start: How would you explain the reality of comms and physics to such a poor fool?

I’m thinking about "With music travelling at light speed, fibre means you can listen to Wagner at ultra-fast speed" - I’m not sure that would work.

"Since your data travels at light speed, your FTTP link can be shared by you and all your neighbours giving full speed downloads the same as just you alone" - that doesn’t seem to help at all.

"You have FTTP and your data travels at light speed, causing an almighty crash and loss of all data where your copper ethernet cable meets your fibre optic link, because the speed of light in copper and the speed of light in a fibre optic cable are different" - errm.


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burakkucat

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How would you explain the reality of comms and physics to such a poor fool?

I wouldn't try.  :-X
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Weaver

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You are no help, my friend.  :) ;)



I have since noticed an additional double horror elsewhere in that advert:

Quote
“Full fibre lets you do more

Everyone online at once: Even if everyone at home or work is online on different devices, with fibre your broadband won’t slow down.”

Two things stand out from that nightmare. (1) There is no such things as ‘being online any more’ it’s like someone talking about the stylus in your CD player. For practical purposes users have not been ‘online’ vs ‘offline’ since the end of dialup something like 15-20 years ago. (2) But ignoring that and remarking that users are in normal situations always permanently online this is an empty statement because it’s equally true for copper or anything you like. I suspect that they are trying to say something about multiple downloads being in progress simultaneously without any slowdown, which is false anyway.
« Last Edit: October 10, 2020, 11:14:11 PM by Weaver »
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j0hn

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"With data travelling at light speed"

It does, does it not?

"fibre means ultrafast downloads"

It does.
Ultrafast is just a UK marketing definition of 100Mb/s+.
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burakkucat

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Writing sensible English is, of course, hard.

I wonder if the following would be an acceptable statement?

"Everyone accessing the Internet, concurrently."
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displaced

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What they should say...

“Hey! Remember when we sold you that ‘fibre’ broadband a few years ago? Well, we were kinda telling porkies.  Sure, there was *more* fibre than there was before, but it wasn’t *all* fibre!  Some fibre’s better than no fibre, right?

Aaaaanyway.  We sold you fibre, but it was actually fibre and copper.  We could have been clearer, but we were all caught up in the excitement, as you can imagine.

So - fibre’s the fast bit, right? Copper is the slow bit.

Here’s some *new* broadband that has *no copper at all*.  How cool is that?  Please buy it if you can, although it’s certainly true that most of you can’t.  Sorry about that.”
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Weaver

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@john the speed of light doesn’t control data transmission rates and is the latter that they are fumblin trying to talk in agreement. Of course I know that you have a full understanding of these matters.
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sevenlayermuddle

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My own biggest gripe, often mentioned, is what exactly is “full fibre”? 

Most people think it means FTTP. Others claim that FTTB also qualifies (often, these people are providers of FTTB).  I have searched long and hard to find an ITU or similar definition of “Full Fibre“, and failed to find one.  Yet there it is, in everyday adverts (though admittedly, this one does clarify they mean FTTP). 

Arguably, “full fibre” would mandate glass cables to replace ethernet, but when copper STP can support 1Gbps and more, would there be any point?  Electrical signals in copper ethernet already travel at speeds comparable to “speed of light”.

“Full fibre”, seems to me, would also preclude WiFi as your tablets, phones and laptops would need to be connected via a physical glass cable rather than wireless, which might well take the wind from the sails of those who worship the phrase.

I would love to be proven wrong about all that, by a reference to an authoritative definition of “Full Fibre”. :-\
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Ronski

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7LM It is clear to most here that we/they are talking about the delivery medium to the property , not the distribution system within said property. As you mentioned yourself it would be totally impractical to have a full fibre distribution system which includes portable devices.
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sevenlayermuddle

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@Ronski, I don’t agree that use of inaccurate words to describe technology are justified simply because it is “obvious”.   Why not just use the correct terms in advertising and media, which would *usually be “FTTP”?

* Leaving my pedantic comments about WiFi aside, I have also seen “Full Fibre” used to describe FTTB.   An FTTB provision will in some cases be inferior to FTTP, but it’s hard to call it misleading if “Full Fibre” has no defined meaning - still waiting to be contradicted, if anybody can find a convincing reference.
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Weaver

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Re: With data travelling at light speed, fibre means ultrafast [sic] downloads
« Reply #10 on: October 11, 2020, 11:23:41 AM »

The speed at which data ‘travels’ affects latency; what the poor witless fool who wrote this nonsense is trying to talk about is data transfer rate -why, because she/he tells us ‘fibre means ultrafast downloads’. The truly sad case in question has been seduced by thinking about a fast squirt of water coming out of the end of a pipe at high pressure rather than a huge wide pipe pouring out tons of water per second. The person is completely lost because they have been trapped by the polysemy of the word ‘fast’.

When j0hn talked about data ‘travelling’ I think this is where the ad-writers managed to hang themselves: on the difference between fast as in end-to-end transit time and fast as in data transfer rate.

I have never met an advertisement copywriter who can manage to string together a correct english sentence, and asking for one that makes sense is even harder.
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: With data travelling at light speed, fibre means ultrafast [sic] downloads
« Reply #11 on: October 11, 2020, 01:11:49 PM »

"With data travelling at light speed"

It does, does it not?

Depends, what IS the "speed of light" anyway?  I guess it moves at the speed of light over fibre, but that's not the same as the speed of light through air, or in a vacuum, so its kind of a meaningless claim without context.
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sevenlayermuddle

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Re: With data travelling at light speed, fibre means ultrafast [sic] downloads
« Reply #12 on: October 11, 2020, 02:17:35 PM »

Agreeing (I think) with Weaver, isn't the immense bandwidth of optical fibre that makes it 'good' (for broadband), rather than the fact that propagation speed may be different from electrons flowing through copper?

I'm - right now - in the process of debugging a gadget I've been building.  It does various (not relevant) things but, once deployed, it needs to be able to communicate with a human user at short distances.  It does this using a single LED, sending text messages in morse code.  There's no doubt that my device is signalling "at the speed of light", but nobody would describe the data flow as "fast".
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burakkucat

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Re: With data travelling at light speed, fibre means ultrafast [sic] downloads
« Reply #13 on: October 11, 2020, 03:40:03 PM »

Depends, what IS the "speed of light" anyway?  . . .
Approximately  2.998 x 108 ms-1  (to three decimal places) in a vacuum. But less than that in high purity glass (such as used in optical fibres) and significantly less than that in plastic optical fibres.
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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: With data travelling at light speed, fibre means ultrafast [sic] downloads
« Reply #14 on: October 11, 2020, 09:16:21 PM »

Approximately  2.998 x 108 ms-1  (to three decimal places) in a vacuum. But less than that in high purity glass (such as used in optical fibres) and significantly less than that in plastic optical fibres.

But that's my point, if they aren't giving you that frame of reference when advertising it as such, then its meaningless.

You can end up with lower latency on FTTC than FTTP as its more down to the ISPs PoP than the technology getting you to the backhaul.
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