Fake Fibre Broadband

lee111s

AndyPK wrote: »

you can get faster speeds down virgins coax(200Mbps?), than BT's/OR twisted pair though.

If you're lucky enough to not be in a contended area. Ping and jitter still tends to be worse on VM.

G.fast is imminent along with Openreach's increasing roll out for FTTP (appreciate VM are doing some full FTTP too but congestion will still remain I imagine).

kwikbreaks

onomatopoeia99 wrote: »

A better physical layer than twisted pair, certainly, but that reflects the the later time that network was built.

Actually neither were designed for broadband delivery. One for voice and the other for piped analogue TV. It's nothing short of a miracle that the old twisted pair tech originally laid down to deliver 3kBps can actually deliver up to 24Mbps over the same copper and upto 76Mbps from a nearby street cabinet.

DOCSIS is actually just as much of a bodge job and although it can deliver high downstream speeds that are distance independent there is an Achilles heel in the way upstream is handled and that coupled with torrents is why you'll see some people claiming their connection is little better than dialup at times.

AndyPK

My virgin upload is 3Mbps. Silly! I was trying to upload some video's last week.

kwikbreaks

A cable downstream channel handles 50Mbps and an upstream only 18Mbps. With upstream the modem has to request an upstream time slot to transmit and that is what leads to the jitter.

With xDSL technologies there is an uncontended path back to the DLM where it joins fibre but with cable it's a shared path so if modems transmitted whenever they had data you'd get collisions.

Last time I was on cable there were 4 x 50Mbps downstreams and 2 x18Mbps upstreams and that puny bandwidth would have been shared with maybe a couple of hundred or more customers. VM were selling 100Mbps down and either 5 or10Mbps up together with throttling back bandwith hogs. The ASA said they couldn't advertise as unlimited with the throttling in place so it got either seriously curtailed or removes I'm not sure which. Naturally there was no corresponding network upgrade so in many places contention replaced the deliberate throttling and everybody suffered,

Looking at the way pricing is going now everybody bumped their rates when the ASA decided they had to include line rental in the prices to help the mathematically challenged there is a chance I may be going back to cable at the end of my minimum term this June because VM pricing looks better than PlusNet fibre right now.

Buzby

Can I clarify that Virgin did NOT originally claim they had a fibre network. I have their service since it started in my area (1996). It was an additional service to TV/Phone and fibre was never mentioned.

BT started this and I complained to OFTEL about the misrepresentation, who sided with BT in that if it was materially faster then dial-up, it was allowed. The use of the term Superfast Broadband is also lamentably nonsensical. When Virgin jumped on the 'fibre' bandwagon, they admitted it was because of BT's misdirection, but would be disadvantaged commercially if they didn't.

I'm on 200Mb/s from Virgin, something that BT cannot get close to - but as they don't offer FTTC in my area, and nobody can afford FTTP, that's a non starter. When this does change, what will they call it? It can't be 'fibre' as that ship has already sailed- perhaps it's going to be SuperDuper Broadband?