Virgin = fiber ??

[snowdog]

Following an msn conversation saying people choose virgin because it's fiber: The site says this :

Add broadband and phone

It's fast. It's fibre optic. And it's half price, when you take a Virgin Phone line for £11 a month. Plus, it gives you unlimited downloads and UK weekend calls. Yes... it truly is the mother of all broadband.

Is this true? I highly doubt virgin is home to home fiber, else they wouldn't offer such pathetic speeds with such low data limits and speed...

Over here, fiber means you do have the choice of the lower speeds yes, but not ''up to 20 mb'', here it's also ( iirc) 50, 100 and 1000 megabits... And only in a few neighborhoods in some bigger cities, you can basically forget about having fiber in a quiet suburb atm... Does virgin really have fiber to all houses with a cable connection, eg. not using a copper coax connection into homes ??? Or is it a marketing trick ( eg. only fiber between exchanges, which in all honesty is nothing special, more like standard...). As I highly doubt that if they have the bandwidth of fiber, that they still offer such pathetic fair use limits...

 

[FrenchTart]

It's marketing speak. Virgin indeed don't do FTTH... They have fiber on the backhaul (who doesn't?) and so on...

 

[snowdog]

Okay another thing: Someone claims these few things, which of imo are incorrect, anyone care to comment on virgin using fiber in their cables :

all i want to show u is that fibre is bundled into cables which in turn virgin use, unless there lying and just have copper in there cables, but unless u chop a virgin cable in half to see whats inside i duno

- Marek - zegt:
they dont use house to house fiber cables, they never did and they wont in the near future
- Marek - zegt:
only between exchanges

its underground

 

[FrenchTart]

Person 2 doesn't know what they're talking about.

And "it's underground"? Shocking revelation! Cables are run underground now? Amazing!

 

[#Chri5#]

http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/adjudications/Public/TF_ADJ_43928.htm if you're bored.

 

[Nick1881]

Its not fiber to the home else there wouldnt be a coax cable going into the modem, from what I understand its fiber optic to the box in the street and then normal wire the rest of the way. Personally my 20mb connection gives me 20mb most of the time (and I dont just mean the traffic shaping) so I also have adsl for those times when VM are messing around or experiencing higher volumes of traffic or what ever it is that causes the speed to slow and some times the ping to go a bit crazy.

 

[tolien]

It's called HFC for a reason - the fibre terminates at some point (IIRC VM reckon 90% of custards have <1km of coax) and coax runs the rest of the way (with a length of coax between you and the run in the street).

 

[kibblerok]

Virgin use fibre to differentiate themselves from ADSL - their main point is that they use fibre for most of the route and therefore do not experience the same degradation you do with distance and ADSL

20mb virgin cable or 20mb FTTH would give you the pretty much the same service i'd have thought - with perhaps an decrease in pings

The lousy speeds and STM are a different matter and to do with capacity and limiting your speed on purpose

 

[jaybee]

If you want this answered in depth there are plenty of cable forums out there that will go into major detail. But for now, the post above explains it in its basic form.

 

[bigredshark]

I'll add, it's not like virgin have substancially more fibre than ADSL providers really, as a percentage of the circuit. ADSL is still fibre from the exchange onwards for most ISPs these days and so the percentage of the connection which is fibre is likely very similar...it's ~1km give or take for VM and ~5km for ADSL...

 

[Snakedoctor]

The cable to your home and to the cabs in the street is coax. The fibre is between the headends, or "Exchanges" (UBR).

 

[tehgazza]

the fibre on virgin media is to the large cabinets, i would say for majority of people on virgin cable these are sub500m runs and additionally the coax is a better transportation method than the copper phone line. eg try and get BT to send 300 digital tv channels, 20 analogs and 3 modem frequencies down the phone line

 

[tolien]

Try and get VM to run a voice service to the north of Scotland, or any of the other 50% of the country VM don't cover...

 

[tehgazza]

i was saying in relation to people saying about vm being coax for sub 500m run and it may aswell be copper. it would be good with more coverage, but do you see it in any country (US cable is only in major cities and major towns)cable is only run in profitable areas, no point in putting it in areas where no one will subscribe

 

[tolien]

You're hardly comparing like with like - HFC that was built ~a decade ago in cherrypicked regions (and even then the companies laying them all went bust) versus copper pairs, mostly laid long before that when there was no idea of the internet, and available to something like 99.6% of the population.

A 500m run of twisted copper pairs would be good for VDSL2 at silly speeds as well...

 

[tehgazza]

500m of copper vdsl2=100mbit max.
500m of coax=300mbit+

 

[tolien]

300Mbit/s shared among all the users on the segment versus 100Mbps for you and you alone...