Need for speed? CityFibre punts 5.5 Gbps symmetrical broadband at ISPs Alternative UK network CityFibre has lifted the lid on a 5.5 Gbps wholesale package it says will allow internet service provider (ISP) customers to operate a service more than twice as fast than its current top-speed fiber product. The biz said its symmetrical 5,500/5,500 Mbps product will be made available "soon" over its …
Given it's GPON, I'm guessing they have taken the maximum backhaul they have attached to the other end, divided by the number of people per splitter they intend to connect, and gone with the number this produces. It's weird but slightly bigger then say, 5, and everyone knows the bigger number is the better service, right?
Absolutely, remember the GHz wars with processor speeds, or the Megapixel wars with camera 'resolutions'?
Same thing. Look maybe someone will prove me wrong, which is fine, but I really can't think of any possible reason why anyone would want a domestic connection that fast.
Except I am reminded of something that I posted on a few forums (and got downvoted) when gigabit connections were being deployed, which was 'the biggest use of a gigabit connection is to run a speed test and hence boast that they have a gigabit connection'.
Sound familiar?
They don't. But you just know some people will want the bragging rights.
From the ISP's point of view, the usage is unlikely to be much different than a 1Gb connection, but the revenue will be significantly higher. That makes it a win. Plus ISP bragging rights: "fastest consumer broadband in the country"
> They don't. But you just know some people will want the bragging rights.
I couldn't imagine anyone doing that...
speedtest -s 42840
Speedtest by Ookla
Server: joelmueller.ch - Bern (id: 42840)
ISP: Init7
Idle Latency: 3.04 ms (jitter: 0.03ms, low: 3.01ms, high: 3.08ms)
Download: 9400.20 Mbps (data used: 9.6 GB)
3.41 ms (jitter: 0.49ms, low: 3.02ms, high: 28.29ms)
Upload: 9205.55 Mbps (data used: 9.8 GB)
4.46 ms (jitter: 0.57ms, low: 2.79ms, high: 4.95ms)
Packet Loss: 0.0%
My limit would be the hardware in the house, that's only at GigE speeds, and that's just plenty...
I and getting an upgrade in a few days from 500Mbps symmetric to 900Mbps symmetric, mostly because pricing is weird and it's cheaper.
At least I can just about justify a connection that's the same speed as my internal network... any faster is truly pointless (and so is the 900 frankly, but as I said, it's cheaper for reasons best left to bean counters)
'a' disk? Some of us have rather more than one disk as the final endpoint storage.
Ive just migrated from 1GB to 2.5GB, both symetric. The per-month price difference is neglible. I get 278MB/sec downloads. My NVMe data drive can handle that with ease. My Mac Pro can handle that. The hard disk based array in my NAS can handle that My internal network is 10GB - because I can, and it means shunting IOS images from storage to Proxmox/Eve takes seconds.
It also improved the bandwidth available to several colleagues connecting to Eve-ng.
5.5MB would be a bonus, given the firewalls WAN port supports multi-gig. And I change it, Intel X710-cards are cheap as chips
Always makes me laugh the "why does anyone need X bandwidth to the home. People have been saying that since ADSL2 days at least.
Its not as if anyone is being forced to upgrade
"During lockdown three of us were often Zooming/Teamsing simultaneously with no issues at all."
Good point, latency; generally more important than headline speed, for time sensitive applications; especially gaming!
But yes, it's just a marketing exercise, 'our speed is higher than your speed'!
Now in the UK, Virgin Media broadband plays the 'fastest overall broadband provider' card; which is probably and technically true; but don't assume it will be the best for gaming.
Yeah - distance can cause it's own issues, I suspect your DSL in Edinburgh is performing well above average, but would the fibre beat DSL in the same place (either rural or city)?
I'm not exactly in a city, but a fairly large town, and only just down the road from the green box... and fibre (both OR and CF) latency is substantially better than my DSL ever managed.
But I'm lucky enough to have lots of choices.
I have 60/10 VDSL2 and while fiber is now available where I live the company providing it has some pretty shoddy customer service plus I'd have to have a hole drilled in my wall since they won't mount an external ONT on a residence only for commercial buildings. I recently got my mom converted to them from the cable internet she was getting since it was cheaper, her 200/200 (their lowest end package) is even more overkill for her than it would be for me but now I won't have to hear her complain about her internet going out every time there's a thunderstorm (yes she called the cable company multiple times, they kept claiming they checked their stuff and found no issues so it must be "the wiring in her house" lol)
I honestly can't really think of a reason why I would need more bandwidth than what I have. Sure I guess it would be nice if big downloads like a new iOS release happened a bit faster but I can't really think of any time when I'm sitting around waiting on something like that. Plus even if every download happened in 5 milliseconds it wouldn't make the process of unpacking, verifying, and installing whatever was downloaded any quicker. My mom's fiber has a few milliseconds less latency than I do which is the only thing I really could benefit from with fiber.
If I had a few teenagers under my roof it would be a different matter, but even with a half dozen teenagers still couldn't see a legit use case for a gigabit to a home. Been saying that for years and even now when we're talking about 5.5, 10 and even faster in some places it is still true. It is sold to consumers who falsely believe "more is better" and that it will make their PC faster or their TV streams have fewer dropouts, but once you're above a few hundred megabits it won't make a difference with either.
There is another fiber provider in town that doesn't suck, I keep hoping to hear they are expanding to where I live but so far it seems to be on the other side of town.
I'm sure Netgear would love to solve that problem for you by selling you a switch with all 5 gigabit ports! Or all 10 gbase-t ports if you got this 5.5 service, wouldn't want to waste that last few hundred megabits after all!
If your PC isn't up to snuff after that then Dell would be happy to solve that problem lol
Not sure my wiring would be up to any more...
Laced the house with cat5 (Maybe cat5e, I can't remember) twenty years ago, and haven't upgraded any of it since... despite basically all of the cables running outside for some of their run, none are externally rated - but they now can't be replaced because the building has had alot of work done around them.
Calling does us highlight congestion elsewhere as the site and services you consume.
You may have a Ferrari, but can’t drive past a crawl in London, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Oxford or NYC, Paris, Tokyo etc
Where you do find an open road, you will probably break a rim in a pot-hole … no doubt caused by CityFibre’s shoddy wildcat roadworks burying the cable within 1 micron of minimum regulated depth in unducted soil/hardcore under the tarmac/pavement:
From my perspective I wish they would speed up the process of lighting up the fibres that have already been laid. We had fibres pulled through to our local junction boxes months ago, but that's it. No mention on theirs or others websites regarding availability, almost as if it doesn't exist.
Surely someone in the company would like to derive some income from their investment, or don't modern telecomms companies work like that any more?
Thankfully my ADSL connection has become less contended due to Virmin Media also supplying my area, but that's not what I want.
There's a lot of jobs that they have to do in order to deliver to an area.
They sometimes start with the residential area ducts as they don't know whether they'll be blocked or clear and therefore can't predict how long it will take to install.
In parallel, they'll start building the backbone etc.
Once it's all in place, they can test it. Only once tested will they make it available to order.
If they've installed cable to your chamber but you haven't seen anything else for a while, that probably means that your ducts were clear.
It's also entirely possible that the cable that was installed was for a private circuit, leased line, etc and nothing to do with a wider rollout.
How much are you willing to pay?
Openreach launching 1000 Mbps symmetric full fibre service (posted 28th Feb 2025)
> we expect retail pricing to be in the region of £200/month making this a connection for those operating a business.
Because they know consumers will use only a tiny tiny fraction of their 900/900 (let alone 5500/5500) service unless they're running a bittorrent node, while a business of any size is likely to actually USE what they're paying for.
They give businesses lower upload speeds because they want to put businesses that host into a separate category where they can negotiate those contracts individually. Partially because their needs can be so diverse (they may only need a moderate committed rate but want a much higher burst rate for e.g. when they're doing backups at night) and partially because ISPs want to charge them more just because they can.
> My local GPON provider
Bully for you.
But whilst there are alternative providers in a few places in the UK, for the rest of us, OpenReach's infrastructure tends to be it. Or Virgin, but let's not go there. So unless someone gives their location, the only safe answer is to reference the ex-BT people.
Anyone know why BT don't offer symmetric?
1. So that they can continue to offer "Unlimited" bandwidth packages.
In the download direction, there's only so much bandwidth you can consume: sooner or later you need to watch those videos, or play those games you downloaded. Faster speed mostly means downloading the same amount in a shorter time.
But in the upload direction, there are a minority of people who abuse the network by filling the pipe 24x7, whether that be by hosting bittorrent or by doing full backups of their server every 10 minutes to the cloud. If you apply a transfer limit or FUP, even something huge like 10TB per month, everyone will complain loudly. By keeping the upload speed low, you put a lid on the problem.
Remember that BT/OR are mainly concerned about the 95% of people who just watch Netflix and download games, not the 5% who process 8K video at home and upload it.
2. So that they can allow altnets some of the customers.
If BT/OR were to squeeze altnets completely out of the market, this would be considered anti-competitive, and lead to increased regulation. The altnets have only two selling points: they are cheaper (since they can cherry-pick where to build and are unregulated); and they offer faster uploads. BT/OR is happy to hand off the least profitable, most bandwidth-hungry 5% of customers to altnets in order to show "the market is working".
3. To protect their highly profitable leased line market. Leased lines are still a better grade of service, but for many users, a contended PON symmetric service would be a perfectly acceptable replacement.
There is no difference between the susceptibility of business and residential computers when it comes to botnets (many of them come with the malware/botnet known as windows by default, although more residential computers have GNU/Linux later installed than business computers).
Most residential computers cannot send spam to mailservers configured to mitigate spam, as ISPs often nullroute packets to/from port 25 by default and residential connections don't have rDNS or SPF or DMARC (and "residential" IP ranges are often even blacklisted by default, which is unreasonable unless that can be undone by visiting a JS-free web form to remove an address or address range from it), while business connections are usually not blacklisted and can have a mailserver already setup, which can be used to send lots of spam if it can be hijacked.
A residential connection is usually useless for DoS attacks due to too little upload, but both residential and business connections are useful for DDoSS attacks as both tend to use the same models of insecure/backdoored routers.
>In the download direction, there's only so much bandwidth you can consume: sooner or later you need to watch those videos, or play those games you downloaded. Faster speed mostly means
downloading the same amount in a shorter time.
Bandwidth is utilized, rather than consumed - less than 100% utilization is really a waste of what could be utilized.
ISP's don't usually care how much you download, as it costs them next to nothing if you keep the pipe full the whole time (although ISPs are known to massively oversubscribe a single 1000BASE-T or 10GbE link, despite how it's not that difficult or that expensive to bond multiple links, or go for a 50GbE or higher link, which can cause issues if too many people actually utilize the download effectively).
>But in the upload direction, there are a minority of people who abuse the network by filling the pipe 24x7, whether that be by hosting bittorrent or by doing full backups of their server every 10 minutes to the cloud. If you apply a transfer limit or FUP, even something huge like 10TB per month, everyone will complain loudly. By keeping the upload speed low, you put a lid on the problem.
All decent networking technology is symmetrical - and just like download, less than 100% upload utilization is really a waste of what could be utilized and is not abuse.
The issue is that there are rent seekers on the Internet's pipes and all of them demand payment for every single MiB uploaded, which means it actually costs the ISP something for upload, which can eat into their profits if a lot of upload is utilized, which means ISPs often sabotage the upload to some piddly amount before packets start getting dropped to ensure that they still make a profit from the 5% that actually utilize the connection.
But really upload doesn't cost that much anymore for ISPs that have upstreams that are not massive scammers, thus there is no reason why most ISPs wouldn't be able to have a base 1000BASE-T plan (a 25+ year old technology) or a 10GbE option for those that have a use for that (which ISPs "somehow" offer in some countries; https://www.sakuramobile.jp/lp/?i=home-internet#plans).
For most non-el-reg-reading fibre consumers (say, subcribers to the lancet), asymetrical with an up of 1/2 or 1/3 of down is more than enough. It saves monery for the ISP.
us el reg readers tend to gavitgate towards symetrical, even if we woud be well served by 1/2 or 3/4.
also, instead of a race to the bottom-price war ISPs now maintain sensible prices to have sensible ROIs, and instead offer bandwidths that they know most normal households will never be able to use. Both because the household's equipments lach thecapacity AND because the speed will be caped server/cloud side.
> I don't think I've ever seen such an asymmetrical service offered in the US. The choices are always fibre at 1000/1000 or 100/100, or cable at no more than 40 upstream.
Far north-east corner of the US: I got 50 down/ 10 up on old TV cable. Obviously "throttled"- it would burst faster then settle down to 103% of contracted speed.
In pandemic they took off the throttle and I often saw 330 downloads. Still solid 11 uploads. 30:1 asymmetry ratio.
That actually works OK, most servers don't have great bandwidth. But when I want to upload 20 minute video lessons it is z-z-z-z-z.
There is 100/100 and 200/200 fiber at the street but the company has fewer clues than TW/Spectrum.
Cable speeds are actually determined by how many "channels" they allocate to each router. Each channel they allocate is a set width, so by bonding together more channels they can allocate more data in each direction. For most cable companies there was no need to have much upload bandwidth in the old days when they were sending TV channels down the wire, all they needed to get back was a small amount of subscriber data like what channel you were watching, data from cable TV boxes when those became networked etc. This meant that the equipment to provide channels was heavily biased towards download channels vs upload ones, and this hasn't improved much as the cable TV standards (DOCSIS) are still geared towards download channels.
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I would not touch it wiith a 3m (10ft) pole.
if this wasa serious offer in any way shape or form, it would be backed by 25GPON.
this is a marketing stunt, no more, no less.
I do agree with oversubscription, butthis level of oversuscription is ridiculous.
Even if they were using multiple 10GPON lambdas per fibre, there is only a finitie ammount of lamdas feasible on a gpon fibre install.
The capacity is shared between at most 64 active premises even if take up is 100%. In practice it's more like 30-40% even in areas where the competition is Virgin Media and FTTC so each port shared with less than 30 other active customers.
Most of the other customers will be on gigabit and below. The chances of usage being high enough to max out the PON is tiny. There are 5G and 7G products available over XGSPON and no mass of reports of congestion.
Average residential customer uses less than 10 Mbit/s at peak times. It's really not a problem right now.
If you had a 5.5G service, how often would you actually be filling the pipe at 5.5G, apart from when running speedtests? Then apply this to the (2 or 3) similar users in your neighbourhood. The rest will be watching Netflix at <10Mbps.
Cityfibre have been selling 900/900 on GPON (2.4G down, 1.2G up) for years, which is a much higher level of contention. Nobody complains.
Altnets are great and all (assuming you actually get served by one, I don't) however they'll all become the same as the big ISPs eventually.
Only yesterday read Hyperoptic, one of the bigger ones, has decided to introduce mid-contract price rises, despite it being a core part of their marketing for years that they don't: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/06/hyperoptic-ends-campaign-against-mid-contract-broadband-price-hikes.html
Eventually the market will settle and they'll join together into one or two larger providers, and the perks (no mid-contract price rises, lower prices, better customer service) will soon disappear.
I just switched to a 900 Mbit/sec download/upload plan on my alt-net ISP and they gave me it for £27 a month on an 18-month fixed price contract (and have just sent me a new router which includes some 2.5 Gbps ports). They also do a 2300 Mbit/sec plan for £50 a month, but I doubt I'd need that sort of bandwidth for a very long time. It didn't help that BT Openreach and Virgin Media ignored my town w.r.t. "full fibre" for long enough that an alt-net was the first to offer it (and at much better prices than BT or Virgin).
Telus here in Vancouver, Canada has been offering 1 Gigabit and 3 Gigabit Ethernet for a years now and you can even get 10 Gigabit to the home these days on many major brands if you pay a nice premium. Anybody know what the monthly costs is for your European ISP services? Here in Vancouver with 3 Gigabit Internet with cable TV package and digital home phone service package that has free continent-wide calling between 5 named friends is about $190 CDN or $160 USD or 120 Euros per month so I'm curious what the prices are over the other side of the pond.
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