Only FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) should count as fiber. In Belgium one of the larger cable providers used to advertise their plans as 'FiberNet' while it was only FTTN (fiber-to-the-neighbourhood) and the last step was cable (with significantly lower uplink speeds than what would be attainable with fiber).
We have a lot of fibre-to-the-cabinet in the UK, which means you may only have copper for a few hundred metres. It's obviously nowhere near as good as fibre to the home, but I think lumping it in with plain old DSL is a bit unfair - a lot of people get 60+mbps down and 18+mbps up which isn't too shabby internationally.
I used to have optical fiber in a brand new building in Osaka: the fiber was actually only going to the building, then it was RJ45 (or something very similar, I'll admit never trying to play with it).
It was much faster, and far more reliable than fios by Verizon that I have now in NYC...
