NEW YORK -- Avery Axel was annoyed with his cable company, Comcast, and was considering switching to Verizon's new FiOS fiber-optic TV and Internet service.
The picture on his TV would freeze now and then, and he had heard good things about FiOS. Then the 21-year-old student saw a TV commercial from Comcast that made fun of FiOS and claimed the cable TV company has a larger fiber-optic network.
"I thought to myself: Maybe I don't have to switch, because if Comcast has fiber optics now, that means that they'll be better," said Axel, who lives in Roosevelt, N.J.
But after asking around online, he found that nothing's changed about Comcast's service: It still uses coaxial cable to connect homes. It does use fiber-optic cable further away in the network, as it has for many years.
"From what everyone said ... this is kind of misleading," Axel said.
Axel had fallen for one of a series of commercials run by every major cable company that competes with Verizon's FiOS. Besides Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, Cox and Charter have all run ads belittling FiOS.
The ads have a curiously similar message, emphasizing that cable networks "are" fiber-optic, even though none of the companies draws fiber all the way to the home, like Verizon does in most cases when it installs FiOS. This allows for higher Internet speeds and, according to Consumer Reports, better picture quality.
"Cable is deploying the rhetoric instead of the technology," said Verizon spokeswoman Bobbi Henson.
Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said the ad was referring to the fact that the company has the largest "residential" fiber network in the nation, stretching for 125,000 miles, and noted that a freezing picture doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the network technology.
"Our ads reinforce the value and scope of our fiber network to our customers," she said, adding that the fact that Verizon uses fiber to the home makes little difference to the services it can provide. Comcast has started upgrading its network to provide FiOS-like speeds in 20 percent of its markets this year.
Comcast has started running newspaper ads with the message: "We already have a fiber-optic network serving ALL our homes" reads one in the Seattle-Post Intelligencer.
Fiber-optic lines have been the main conduit for telecommunications since the '80s. In the late '90s, cable companies upgraded their networks to draw fiber closer to homes, which allowed them to offer broadband, video on demand and other services. The fiber lines end at neighborhood nodes, where the signal is transferred to a coaxial cable shared among as many as 500 households. The shared nature of the coaxial network and its susceptibility to electrical noise limits its capacity.
Verizon's FiOS network shares capacity, but among fewer households, and the fiber itself has nearly unlimited data capacity.
Mike Weaver in Watauga, Texas, saw an ad from Charter Communications Inc. that talked about "advanced fiber optics," and was disappointed when he realized that the cable company isn't drawing fiber to the home. He wants the faster Internet speeds provided by FiOS, he said.
