Fibre to Fibre

[kirk1690]

Has virgin any plans;) to ever become a true fibre to fibre network and how would this improve broadband and tv and phone for that matter and why didnt they do it in first place ?:dunce:

[southwell]

I doubt it, at least for the time being. All your equipment is designed to run on coax so it would be very expensive to do this.

[RubberyDuck]

Fibre can support speeds way faster than your current Desktop/Laptop.

Basically it is possible to download a 700MB file in around 1 second, probably quicker.

[haydnwalker]

Only when the equipment allows that.....nothing will ever be truely fibre only as it would still be cat5/6 inside your house (router etc).

[Chris]

Has virgin any plans;) to ever become a true fibre to fibre network and how would this improve broadband and tv and phone for that matter and why didnt they do it in first place ?:dunce:

There's plenty of bandwidth to be squeezed out of the network as it currently stands. Fibre to the home is very expensive even today, and would have bankrupted the industry had they tried to do it when the networks were first laid. Heck, what they do have almost bankrupted them (and probably would have, had NTL been a British company, rather than being owned in the US and able to file for bankruptcy protection while it restructured its debt mountain).

The release of DOCSIS 3 has allowed Virgin Media to offer customers 50meg broadband while previously they were limited to 20meg, without replacing the coaxial cables in their network with fibre upgrades. Future improvements in the DOCSIS standard should allow even better speeds and the removal of analogue TV from VM's network will free up more bandwidth.

There comes a point where there's no value in offering 'even faster' broadband, because huge chunks of the internet itself cannot serve up your files at the speed you're able to receive them.

[broadbandking]

it makes me wonder why VM want to release 200Mb in 2012

[RubberyDuck]

With 5Mb Up ;-)

[General Maximus]

and stm kicks in after 10 seconds

[Halcyon]

Fibre is very expensive. I doubt they will change anything at the moment.

[dannybear]

I very much doubt it they will.

They cant even keep there speeds on the 20mb and 50mb line at full etc.

They like to cut back and use old stuff lol

[|Kippa|]

At least things look brighter for cable people than standard adsl users with regards to what speeds they are most likely to get. I roughly get 19mbit on my 20mbit connection. Some adsl users are lucky to get 2mbit on their supposedly 8mbit connection.

[12noon]

What are you lot downloading. I think my 10MB is fine for what i use it for.

BTW wouldn't it be better if VM invested any money they had into adding more cable areas to the country.

[Stuart]

There's plenty of bandwidth to be squeezed out of the network as it currently stands. Fibre to the home is very expensive even today, and would have bankrupted the industry had they tried to do it when the networks were first laid. Heck, what they do have almost bankrupted them (and probably would have, had NTL been a British company, rather than being owned in the US and able to file for bankruptcy protection while it restructured its debt mountain).

The release of DOCSIS 3 has allowed Virgin Media to offer customers 50meg broadband while previously they were limited to 20meg, without replacing the coaxial cables in their network with fibre upgrades. Future improvements in the DOCSIS standard should allow even better speeds and the removal of analogue TV from VM's network will free up more bandwidth.

There comes a point where there's no value in offering 'even faster' broadband, because huge chunks of the internet itself cannot serve up your files at the speed you're able to receive them.

Indeed. Upgrading every home to fibre would costs VM tens of billions of pounds (they would essentially be rebuilding the largest part of the network, the "last mile") and give little or no immediate benefit to either them or the customers.

Maybe in 10 or 20 years when the average broadband user is using a 20 gigabit connection and we are all looking for Ultra HD online videos (Ultra HD is four times the resolution of Full HD), then it'll be worth it, but not at the moment.

That is, of course, assuming that the rest of the Internet can handle the bandwidth requirements..

[Ignitionnet]

Tens of billions is a huge exaggeration. It would be doable for quite a bit less than that.

I'll have a look into deep fibre architectures. I do know that for the entire UK building from scratch FTTP is under £30 billion. As VM already have ducting and FTTN it would be considerably cheaper for them than the £1200 / home that these costs describe. It would essentially entail 7 different things to do quickly:

1) Place ONTs on customer homes.
2) Pull fibre from local street cabinet to home alongside existing siamese cable.
3) Overbuild existing fibre optic nodes with passive optics, leaving existing network in place.
4) Deploy passive optics to customer DP / tap cabinets.
5) Connect up ONT connected fibre to passive optics in tap cabinet
6) Test fibre optic only links (No node, no media converters, no coaxial trunk) to DP cabinets.
7) Cut over, node by node, cabinet by cabinet, from coaxial feed to all fibre, reclaiming legacy coaxial plant.

The alternative is to run a fibre deep HFC architecture where you run fibre to every cabinet with no coaxial amplification at all. The migration path from there is obvious.

Some magic in the headends and ONTs can take care of the rest. You can run RF and DOCSIS over PON for a while delivering services to customers via fibre optics, and migrate to a fully fibre GPON / GEPON solution on a customer by customer basis via a Gigabit Ethernet output on the ONT when it goes into the home.

The 'rebuild' of cable networks is done every so often, it's actually properly termed an overbuild. UPC are doing just that in the Republic of Ireland on the ex-ntl network there. They are overbuilding the existing HFC and all coaxial MATV networks right down to the coax that serves the homes with 1GHz (I think) EuroDOCSIS plant and in the case of the MATV networks deploying deep fibre.

EDIT: Couple of links to Deep Fibre Passive HFC information, along with migration path via WDM technology:

http://www.aurora.com/solutions/architectures.html
http://www.aurora.com/solutions/segmentation.html