Re: Project Lightning Silence...
 

York expansion announced

"Today we're thrilled to announce that homes and businesses in York will be next to benefit from an ultrafast broadband and entertainment boost this year, as part of our £3bn network expansion across the UK.

Virgin Media are planning to expand our fibre optic network to 20,000 homes and businesses in the area as part of our pledge to bring better connectivity and top-notch TV to 17 million premises by the end of 2019."



http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/...k/ba-p/3234713

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Does "Project Lightning" only refer to the RFoG deployment? Or does that term include coax infill?

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Any form of expansion VMare undertaking comes under lightening

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Would be good if they'd invest the same amount of effort/resource into resolving overutilisation problems on their existing network. Or were more transparent about what they're doing about it.

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The rollout of the new CMTS's is a massive part of that.

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Thanks that's good to know. Wish they would tell you this when you call them up.

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People in the call centre wouldn't have any idea what's going on behind the scenes. Service techs will have limited knowledge/understanding. Network/headend engineers will be in the loop as well as people running/involved in the projects behind the scenes, and nobody can tell timescales. The area I used to cover, one site was cutover to a E6000 in less than 2 weeks. Some other sites are still being built ready for cutover 3 months later....

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Yeah, the various departments within VM, at least on the front line, basically don't talk to each other at all.

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What about areas where ducting exists right to the house, with some cabinets sometimes? I've always concluded that Virgin don't know about all of these areas as surely these areas would be so easy to enable?

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Staff are always asked for this sort of information. It's officially called stranded plant, and I know I've put some forward. If it's able to be added on to an existing nodal area it will be done in a relatively short time. If it needs a whole new nodal area that's a different story

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As I thought then, they don't know. They wouldn't ask staff if they already knew.

It's difficult motivating very busy staff to submit this kind of information, I know that from the company I work for. Also, Virgin Media rely a lot more on contractors than the likes of BT, I believe they even do repairs at Virgin. Obviously they would have even less interest in submitting information as they don't work for the company.

I know of a whole road near here where there's ducts to every single house, but it's about 800m from the rest of the network for that town. Makes you wonder if a Nynex manager at the time lived in that road and pushed it through to be done early!

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To be fair all the stranded plant I've looked at does actually appear on the records, so they do know, but I would imagine it's a lot more time consuming to look over maps of the whole country opposed to a list with it all on. That's only guessing though I'm not certain of anything. Yes VM use contractors, but this sort of information they would be expecting the majority of it to come from network engineers. At the time I was looking at that sort of stuff I was an in house network engineer, the guys who know the local network like the back of their hands, as opposed to a service technician/installer. You say about motivation, I loved my role as a network engineer, and spending time looking for expansion opportunities would be something different from the norm

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4/11/16
"Virgin Media, which is owned by US cable group Liberty Global, has raised its fibre rollout target to 2m premises in Britain in a sign of confidence in consumer appetite for fast internet connections.

The company had previously said that it expected about a quarter of its £3bn broadband investment programme, dubbed Project Lightning, to link homes directly to fibre lines. Virgin has raised this target to 50 per cent after speeding up its building programme."
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/fee3e60e-...3-4351ce86813f
[Non-subscribers should cut and paste the above link into Google and then click on the headline to read]

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Could you explain the difference between a service technician and a network engineer? It's interesting to compare with Openreach.

Openreach don't really separate it out in that way. Other than as I've mentioned there's still some degree of contractor use but only for installs. The direct labour staff (the vast, vast majority) do installs and repairs but staff who are more highly trained are less likely to pick up install jobs.

I agree with your point about motivation, most people would find it interesting but would want to be given the time to do it. Rather than just being expected to find stranded plant whilst simulatanously struggling to fix someone's dodgy broadband with the clock ticking!