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Your 2022 jargon buster guide to broadband and voice

Zen Mar 30 2022

Just when you’d got to grips with ADSL, copper, PSTN and the like, the 2020s have come along to blow all those old terms out of the water and introduce the world to a whole new collection of acronyms and initialisms.

And so, we figured it was time to provide some up-to-date jargon busting advice on what some of these new broadband and voice terms actually mean. But let’s cover some of the basics to begin with.

Megabits vs Megabytes

A quick run-down here. There are eight megabits (Mb) in a megabyte (MB). Broadband speeds tend to be measured in megabits while megabytes are used to measure file sizes.

And for those that use the two terms interchangeably, that can be somewhat confusing when their broadband download speeds aren’t quite as high as they expected.

Incidentally, if you wondered why speed is measured in bits and file sizes in bytes, that’s because data over the internet is delivered one bit at a time.

Fibre vs Fibre

Not all fibre is the same.

Wind the clock back ten years and, typically, whenever fibre broadband was mentioned, it was your fibre-to-the-cabinet variety. That’s where – as the name implies – fibre optic cable carried the broadband data all the way to the local street cabinet, but those last few (or few dozen) yards consisted of older copper technology.

Nowadays, when people talk about fibre broadband, they’re much more likely to mean full fibre, which sees the fibre optic cable carry the signal all the way to the home or office it is supplying.

Full fibre is much faster and more reliable than traditional fibre broadband.

Gigabit vs (not) Gigabit

As full fibre connections are reaching more and more premises, a new term in the broadband world has emerged.

‘Gigabit’ broadband typically refers to download speeds of around 900Mbps. That’s about 20 times faster than the average UK broadband connection by the way.

Fibre vs SoGEA

Ok, so as the copper network is withdrawn from use (see our blog from last year for the basics), that older fibre connection (FTTC) we’ve referred to will morph into something slightly different.

Homes and businesses able to receive a full fibre connection will get that, but where full fibre isn’t available, broadband will largely be provided over SOGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access) connections.

A SOGEA connection is basically an FTTC connection without the phone line, by the way (we’ll be covering what’s next for voice in a bit).

You can find out more about the different types of broadband, and how to decide which is the right one for you, in this article.

Openreach vs CityFibre

Most home and business broadband connections throughout the UK depend on the Openreach network – they’re the people responsible for maintaining the existing copper broadband network and laying most of the full fibre connections across the country.

But they’re not the only infrastructure provider. One of the best known non-Openreach providers is CityFibre, who provide full fibre connections in a large (and growing) number of UK cities.

We have relationships with both Openreach and CityFibre to bring fast, reliable full fibre broadband to as many UK homes as possible.

Voice vs Digital Voice

If you’ve been keeping up with our Great British Switch Off articles (like this one), you’ll know that those traditional phone lines that we’ve all taken for granted for so long aren’t very much longer for this world.

That linked article actually does a great job of explaining the new alternative, but here’s the lowdown on Digital Voice.

It’s a replacement for the old-fashioned copper voice service that we’ve all used for so long. Instead of carrying your voice signal over a copper wire, separate from your broadband connection, Digital Voice actually carries your voice calls over the broadband connection itself.

That means no need for separate line rental, and because calls are carried over a much more reliable, higher bandwidth connection, quality is improved.

Unless you’re a business taking a CloudComms service, if you need a home phone in the next couple of years, you’ll most likely be using Digital Voice.

And there you have it. This is by no means an exhaustive guide to every bit of terminology out there, but we hope it has helped to familiarise you with some of the newer terms that you’re likely to hear a lot more of in the months and years to come.