Virgin Media promises speeds of 1Gpbs to 15 million homes – all without full fibre Virgin Media has promised speeds of 1Gbps to 15 million homes by the end of 2021 – although that won't be on full fibre. The company's daddy, Liberty Global, has spent billions expanding its network, said the firm. As part of the blueprint, more than a million people will be able to access broadband speeds of 1Gbps by the end …
This post is not about possible congestion at the ISP...
All too often, locally I see people that might have 100mbps or 1gbps service, but then have nothing connected by ethernet, they have an awful 2.4ghz-only access point that (due to congestion) MIGHT manage 35mbps if they are lucky. The local cable co must be laughing all the way to the bank.
I just have to wonder what good 8gbps service would be? Not that I'm complaining (especially if the price is good), but I for sure do not have 10gig ethernet running at home, and I have dual-band wifi but (given I don't have those wifi clients with 4-8 antennas on them..) it's top speed is like 866mbps.
Why would you want to go 1gbps at home? Do you have a DC in your home?
I work in IT for years, I live in Czech Republic and am originally from Portugal, in PT I have fiber at home with 4play (iptv, internet,phone and all other crap) speed is 200 Mbps and is a way overkill even with all the iptv.
In CZ I have cable hybrid with 500Mbps and I have a second provider with fiber (all new buildings allow you to have at least 2 providers pre-cabled.
Here is as well common the WISPs that can deliver 100 Mbps.
The reality is... it is an overkill, and I don’t use it and I have a lab at home with 25/10Gbps networks so I don’t even have the issue with the home networking. All is an overkill and truly unneeded.
Then we have to remember most devices use wireless... you can’t even exhaust such links. You can join the number of power lines used to extend home networks and very few have cat5 cabling.
Now the big issue is that most of people in I’m, including in metros like London have the craziest DSL line and having 8Mbps is an exotic thing. My company is a telco and all the staff in UK and US by that matter of fact have the craziest connections ever, specially because most leave outside of the city because they can afford a flat in the city where the better infra tends to exist.
Some times I feel ashamed to say to all of these colleagues I have 2 connections over 100 MBps at home for less than 80 pounds, that includes TV, phone and video on demand.
In any case, the next question will be how many of them actually have backbones bigger than 10Gbps, 40 or 100? And for the international links? I know the answer because my company provides a lot of them.
Could people just be a bit more realistic and simple target 100Mbps standard, is more than enough way less investment and better chances to succeed?
I do believe that new infra should be all fiber, is future proof, but there are ways to potentiate existing infra to achieve this, is being done all over the world.
And again people complain because they can only get crappy 8 Mbps in average, if the average would be at least the 24 Mbps for dsl for example, people would be more than ok for the most. You could easily see Netflix or amazon HD while still navigating the internet with no issues.
It was several times mentioned the 5G, regardless the big disappointment that will be, countries are auctioning frequencies at crazy prices and you want on top of that the same companies to have money to be putting fiber all over the place? Be real people!!
Bet in more modest speeds and more reliable and guaranteed.
UK have far more important issues to resolve and better places to spend money, I challenge anyone reading this to say if they wouldn’t be more than happy with 100Mbps at home, I would even say 50.
I personally came to the conclusion that I’m spend money I don’t need in my case and thinking very seriously and get 150 only, because other than speed testing I never exhausted my line capability in real case normal use. I do need in theory the redundancy because of work, so I do have the 2 lines and a 3rd LTE backup, just in case.
Around here there is a lot of Virgin DOCSIS cabling laid in by Telewest many years ago - I benefit form it so I'm not complaining. However I've heard of people with new build houses in between two existing cabled properties that Virgin have refused to cable up, offering only slow ADSL instead. There are also whoole developments in fully cabled areas that haven't been added. It's almost like they are just living off the TeleWest investment that they got for £cheap.
I hope these homes aren't counted in the % of homes 'passed by' by fast cabled services, because they aren't passed by choice...
Talking of Telewest I used to have the Telewest analogue cable service, then they merged with NTL and eventually Virgin.
Virgin started switching off the analogue service (channel by channel) without providing a digital replacement. One day (about 13 years ago) I had a problem with my analogue STB and had an engineer visit. While there I mentioned I couldn't order the digital service, which surprised him, so he plugged in his digital STB to reveal I was receiving a perfectly good digital signal.
I immediately called Virgin customer service to request the digital service, they looked me up on the computer and told me point blank that I could not receive a digital signal, despite me telling them "But I'm watching it right now!" (which freaked them out a bit). As it happened the engineer didn't have a replacement analogue STB so he left me his digital box (with all channels enabled) for 2 weeks until he could return with a replacement analogue box.
After repeated calls to Virgin all with the same "computer says no" result I eventually switched to Sky. It took another 10 years before Virgin offered a digital service by which time I don't think anybody cared as they had already moved on to alternative suppliers.
What a totally inept company.
As many others have stated, gigabit and even high-hundred-bit downstream speeds are excessive for most users currently but the infrastructure still needs to be in place for those who may require it now and for the requirements of the future as technology, such as Ultra High Definition TV, evolves.
I had a 150Mb/s downstream fibre-to-the-cabinet, coax-to-the-home connection with VM which I attained through a series of free upgrades from, IIRC, 10Mb/s to 20Mb/s then 100Mb/s and ultimately 150Mb/s over about twenty five years. However, the upstream speed has remained at a nominal 6Mb/s due to the historical limitations of DOCSIS networks. There are higher downstream speed packages available which include a moderate upgrade to the upstream speed but hopefully, when VM rolls out DOCSIS 3.1, there will be a better ratio of upstream to downstream or even synchronous data rates.
I downgraded my connection to 100Mb/s last year to save money and even that is still superfluous to my needs although I would like to have a higher upstream speed. I run multiple computers with a variety of operating systems, numerous handheld devices and other internet connected equipment and I'm just beginning to experiment with VoIP. I can still survive quite happily with my 100Mb/s connection though.
The immediate aim should be to provide a minimum offering of 25Mb/s downstream and 5Mb/s or, better still, 10Mb/s upstream nationally. Then, where feasible, packages of 50Mb/s, 100Mb/s, 250Mb/s and upwards should be offered with a minimum downstream to upstream ratio of 5:1 available in those packages with 1:1 options being the ideal goal. Like the energy companies that had hundreds of gas and electricity tariffs, the telecommunications companies need to be told to have simplified, comparable plans and easy switching between alternative providers.
Although cable companies, such as VM, don't offer service everywhere yet, the OpenReach network combined with satellite and microwave providers should offer sufficient choice for everyone by 2025. However, ridiculous races to provide unnecessarily high, commercial rate speeds at the expense of offering reasonable speeds to a wider area of the country should be discouraged.
I'm pretty much stuck with Virgin for the moment given how far I am away from the BT cabinet - they estimate between 20 and 30 Mbit which could be eaten by one 4k iPlayer stream (watching the throughput with 4k Wimbledon, I saw it averaging 35-40Mbit)
Virgin service has been pretty good for me so far, although with all the price rises it's become quite expensive. I need to ring up and have a moan again.
Seriously, who the fuck needs a 1GBit Internet connection?? Perhaps in 10-15 years when 8K Video is standard. Was. as anything WiFi will not be able to keep up with it anyway - contended WiFi on their shitty SuperHubs.
A stable, low latency and performant 100MBit would be a better aspiration and stop chasing this numbers bollocks.... that will just put further upward pressure on VM’s now expensive offering.
All it will do is show where else the issues are with slow web-page rendering due to money-grubbing as rendering and data scraping and poor responses elsewhere.
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