difference between fibre optic ISP and others...?

Deals_2

a friend of mine wants to go with Virgin's fibre optic because it is different from other ISP and offers 10 megabites. if someone can explain this would be great. thanks in advance.

totalsolutions

Light (data) travels down a fibre optic tube to your house or telco cabinet in the street then copper cables to your home. I'm sure you will get more than 10MB out of it. Try Wikipedia for more info.

MothballsWallet

Virgin's service, for example, runs TV, phone and broadband down the fibre: this is known in the USA as Deep Fiber. And they're in the process of rolling out 50Mbps services across their network this year.

Incidentally, I worked for Marconi a few years ago, and worked on part of the project to create a European equivalent to Deep Fiber using the technologies used by the European operators, like ntl and Telewest.

One thing to note with this is that the contention ratio (think sharing) is, iirc, around 250:1 for fibre optic, and 50:1 for a normal phone line. This means that you'll be sharing a normal phone line with about 50 other people, but the fibre optic line with about 250 others. This can really affect your broadband speeds at peak times.

[Deleted User]

With ADSL you rely on the distance from your house to the exchange and the quality of the copper cable. With Cable you are connected to the green boxes in the street with Copper, but from there onwards it's Fibre Optic which is not affected by distance, nor quality of the cable.

With Cable you are more likely to get the speeds advertised, but this does rely on the contention ratio of your UBR (Universal Broadband Router) not being oversubscribed with heavy users.

MothballsWallet

anewhope: ah, so cable's not true fibre to the door (yet). I never knew that. The stuff we worked on was for use in the green street cabinets.

[Deleted User]

MothballsWallet wrote: »

anewhope: ah, so cable's not true fibre to the door (yet). I never knew that. The stuff we worked on was for use in the green street cabinets.

Nah, for the time being it shares the CATV cable that comes into the house and then gets split inside for a broadband connection if required. Five or so years ago I was working at NTL and there was talk of trying to get the Optics into the house, but I guess that got put to the side like most other investments in their network..