@Jayach wrote:
I think you are a little confused, there is no fibre involved in either of those. They are both copper all the way.
Dial up: at your end You have a device that modulates and demodulates a digital signal into audio noises which are on the same wavelength as voice signals travel on, called a Modem. these noises represent the 1's and 0's of binary code - in other words data. This device will dial a number which would be one for a dial up internet server ( that unless being used for point to point communication ie not the internet) this phone cal made on the copper cables l made by the modem or for the modem would end up at another modem owned/operated by your internet service provider which in turn would be connected to the ISP's point of presence (POP) which in almost all cases would be a Fibre optic cable
ADSL - aka Broadband, ADSL stands for Asymetric Digital Subscriber line. again you will have a modem recently these eventually became multi function devices incorporating amongst other things, a wifi access point, a router, Ethernet switch and firewall etc, and are commonly called routers.
The modem part of this operates at a higher frequency than voice signals so it can be transmitted along the copper cables without interfering too much with voice data , however minor issues can be caused with traditional voice services - hence the addition of micro filters to block out any effects of the high frequency - should be out of the range of human hearing noises.
The higher frequency means that much more data can be transmitted but it wont travel as far as a voice signal - so the Fibre optic cable terminates that the telephone exchange in a device called a DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access Modulator)
VDSL: also known as FTTC ( Fibre to the Cabinet). VDSL stands for Very high bit rate Digital Subscriber Line
As the frequency is higher than that used with ADSL then more data can be transmitted, down the copper cable however the higher the frequency means the distance has to be shorter so to achieve that the DSLAM is moved to a street cabinet and form there fibre optic cable to the exchange and back to the ISPs point of presence - other variants of this also exist but are rare in the UK such as Fibre to the Node (FTTN) but with ADSL/VDSL the last hop to a property is almost always on a copper cable
other technologies such as Gfast are a variant of this using even higher frequency ranges
Fibre to the Premises/fibre to the home - this brings the fibre cable right to the property and cuts out any interference/degradation issues with the above
A few years back Offcom received a complaint that people were being deceived by ISPs marketing FTTC as Fibre it was decided that as fibre is involved somewhere in the chain then it can be marketed as fibre , by the same logic then dial up is also Fibre as a fibre optic cable is involved somewhere in the chain.
The end result is now that real Fibre is with us people are confused and who can blame them?
Its a complex mix of technologies, acronyms and none of it is made easy when coupled with marketing terms .
So thats the reasoning behind asking the OP what they plugged their "boxes " into and testing the water if they know what an ONT is - another clue would be asking what package/speeds they were getting with their previous provider - Sky
