The majority, the cable, the rest

British broadband advertising is a costume drama. The logos change; the trenches often do not. A household that thinks it is “leaving BT for Sky” may be leaving one Openreach retailer for another, on the same fibre, with a different app and a different call centre. A household that moves to Community Fibre or Virgin Media is actually changing the physics in the wall.

Three families of network

Openreach is the majority machine: copper on the way out, FTTP on the way in, sold wholesale to a shelf of retailers. Virgin Media O2 still runs a large coaxial cable network and is overlaying full fibre under the Nexfibre build. Alt-nets built their own FTTP — some wholesale (CityFibre), some mostly retail (Hyperoptic, Community Fibre, YouFibre), some rural (Gigaclear, regional builders). KCOM is its own island in Hull.

None of these families is “better” as a slogan. Openreach is where most homes will land, and competition between retailers on that network is real. Virgin’s cable products can still be the fastest thing on a street that fibre has not finished. Alt-nets often win on price-lock and upload, then lose on Saturday-night support or a coverage footprint that stops two roads over.

Choose the network first, the retailer second. Most disappointment is a mix-up between those two jobs.

How we show it

Every plan in the comparison carries a network and a technology. Recommended sort uses availability confidence at the address, not a national brand ranking. A beautiful alt-net product that the mock file — and later a live feed — cannot place at your premises will not be dressed up as available. If our feed is the problem, we will not pretend the network is the problem.

• Retail brand: who bills you.
• Network: whose fibre or cable reaches the building.
• Technology: FTTP, cable, or legacy part-fibre.
• Upload: the forgotten half of “speed”, especially on older cable and FTTC.

If two full-fibre products land on the same street, the honest comparison is first-year cost, contract, install type and what happens when it breaks. The logo is decoration. The trench is the product.

How to read a van

A liveried van is not coverage. Openreach in the road can be a repair, a drop, or a spine for someone else. CityFibre purple is wholesale. Cable is a tap until Nexfibre is a button. Ask which plant the checker names, then which retailers sell on it. The van is scenery.