Commerce Commission lays charges on Voda for FibreX

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#1995479 13-Apr-2018 13:25

ChrisVodafoneNZ:

Lias:

Good, long overdue, it's utterly misleading. When you throw in them also refusing offer UFB services to customers in HFC areas, it looks even worse. I hope they get a record fine, and it's a shame that the executives who signed off on it can't be thrown in jail for a few years.

By definition, FibreX and full fibre are both ultra-fast broadband. It is not a registered trade mark and it is not specific to the Government’s UFB Initiative.

Big hair to split. When it has its own Wikipedia article, it's reached the threshold of a notable colloquialism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Fast_Broadband

No signature to see here, move along...

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Lias

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#1995499 13-Apr-2018 14:02

Am I the only one who find Vodafones attempts to spin/defend this pathetic? They made a cynical decision to deliberately mislead consumers to try and extract value from their purchase of the HFC network, and now try and play the victim when they finally get called on it.

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#1995511 13-Apr-2018 14:12

BlakJak:

ChrisVodafoneNZ:

Lias:

Good, long overdue, it's utterly misleading. When you throw in them also refusing offer UFB services to customers in HFC areas, it looks even worse. I hope they get a record fine, and it's a shame that the executives who signed off on it can't be thrown in jail for a few years.

By definition, FibreX and full fibre are both ultra-fast broadband. It is not a registered trade mark and it is not specific to the Government’s UFB Initiative.

Big hair to split. When it has its own Wikipedia article, it's reached the threshold of a notable colloquialism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Fast_Broadband

I can see an update coming shortly to the page to "correct the record"

I'm personally surprised the ASA didn't uphold the complaint and accepted the spin that was on offer. It seems the Comcom have picked up where the ASA left off.

sbiddle

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#1995517 13-Apr-2018 14:25

The letter X is commonly used in the English language at the end of a word or brand to define a crossover or hybrid technology. In this case FibreX is a fibre hybrid technology and the description fits that perfectly.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Commerce Commission legal action actually fails. They have had to work hard to build a case and even convince themselves that they could get a prosecution. Some of that has some from asking consumers if they believe they were mislead into thinking they were getting fibre rather than looking at whether the term itself is misleading.

Vodafone have plenty to defend themselves with and plenty of case law and examples of "fibre" products globally.

Anybody care to answer what type of product BT Infinity is without cheating and Googling it first?

noroad

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#1995524 13-Apr-2018 14:30

ChrisVodafoneNZ:

We are proud of FibreX – we believe it is a great ultra-fast broadband choice and don’t want people to confuse it with other fibre access technologies.

We want consumers to know that FibreX is a true competitor to full fibre offering comparable download speeds, but with a better install experience and at a lower price point.

As someone who used to work at TelstraSaturn and knows how HFC (especially that network) works very well I appreciate that it does have some life left in it and **should** be able to provide a good service level.

The issue I have here though is twofold, firstly no amount of corporate doublespeak or hiding behind lawyers will mask the fact that marketing the "Hybrid Fibre Coax" network as "Fibre X" is any more valid than if Chorus marketed its cabnitised UBA copper product as "Fibre something-or other". Calling a technology that delivers the service to the end custoemr over big fat copper co-ax cables is pure fraud in an attempt to capitalize on all the public attention around the FTTH/GPON network.

The second issue I have with this is that historically ever since Telstra bought Saturn (and then all the subsequent company iterations) the network has been under invested in. Telstra was never fully committed to the platform (hence why the Christchurch rollout stopped half way through Christchurch) and expensive upgrades were only ever done once the flood of customer complaints became unbearable. I would find it quite unlikely that Vodafone will significantly invest capital in a network that is both being overbuilt and is at the effective tail end of its usefulness. FTTH/GPON can easily migrate to 10GE PON, DWDM PON etc in the future. HFC has very little room for improvement and no networking company that has shareholders expecting a return would do anything but sweat the asset to the last possible moment. This means people who are fooled into thinking they are on the wonderful new national fibre network will have a service that significantly degrades (as has happened many times) over time.

shrub

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#1995526 13-Apr-2018 14:32

gaddman:

gbwelly:

shrub:Great news. I was one of the first people to get gigabit FibreX and I can tell you its not even close to gigabit Fibre.

In what way? Always slower, or suffering during congestion?

Yeah, also curious on that. We've done a lot of testing ourselves, plus there's independent testing, which shows the performance is comparable. Note that there isn't any congestion on the network - it's pretty lightly loaded at the moment.

Ping was 15-20 higher everywhere

Download speed while yes you can hit 940mbps to vodafone servers good luck getting anymore that 100mbps outside of that.

Upload same issue as download

Random drop outs that the helpdesk could see but did nothing about.

Youtube and facebook videos stalling/buffering

They would not accept a fault unless I was using their router.

The router provided crashed with any more than 10 devices so I had to do testing for them with 1 device attached.(Not real world)

My issues went on and on.

I have been with orcon gigabit fibre for 9 months now and have had no issues.

Amosnz

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#1995531 13-Apr-2018 14:37

sbiddle:

The letter X is commonly used in the English language at the end of a word or brand to define a crossover or hybrid technology. In this case FibreX is a fibre hybrid technology and the description fits that perfectly.

So CopperX could also describe the HFC then.

Speedtest

Jase2985

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#1995546 13-Apr-2018 14:52

Amosnz:

sbiddle:

The letter X is commonly used in the English language at the end of a word or brand to define a crossover or hybrid technology. In this case FibreX is a fibre hybrid technology and the description fits that perfectly.

So CopperX could also describe the HFC then.

more like coaxX

dfnt

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#1995556 13-Apr-2018 15:05

A friend of mine has FibreX, she thought she had fibre broadband till I pointed out it wasn't actually fibre..

gaddman

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#1995560 13-Apr-2018 15:11

noroad:

The second issue I have with this is that historically ever since Telstra bought Saturn (and then all the subsequent company iterations) the network has been under invested in. Telstra was never fully committed to the platform (hence why the Christchurch rollout stopped half way through Christchurch) and expensive upgrades were only ever done once the flood of customer complaints became unbearable. I would find it quite unlikely that Vodafone will significantly invest capital in a network that is both being overbuilt and is at the effective tail end of its usefulness. FTTH/GPON can easily migrate to 10GE PON, DWDM PON etc in the future. HFC has very little room for improvement and no networking company that has shareholders expecting a return would do anything but sweat the asset to the last possible moment. This means people who are fooled into thinking they are on the wonderful new national fibre network will have a service that significantly degrades (as has happened many times) over time.

We actually invested a whole lot of money into the network to upgrade it, including deploying both DOCSIS3.1 and NG-PON2, which means the network can now run at gigabit speeds. And like FTTH/GPON, the NG-PON2 we're on has a path to 10GE. Bear in mind there's a lot of cable networks deployed worldwide - there is plenty of investment and R&D going into getting faster and faster speeds on HFC.