Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

Yes, sounds like an installer trying to make himself sound important!

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

There were engineers around a couple of weeks ago, I have a cabinet directly outside my house and I received a letter from Virgin saying I could now receive digital services, but their online checker & sales team say otherwise.

Anyone have any advice as to what to do next?

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

Where do you live?

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

Slough

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

Not all areas on London West upgrade have been released yet - the letter may have been sent too early

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

Would there be any way to get an idea of when it will be available if that's the case?

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

As far as I'm aware it's only Uxbridge that's been released so far. As soon as I see Slough being mentioned I'll post it

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

don't suppose anyone would know if Virgin are planning on finishing the LN6 8 area?

Most of it is done, but there's literally hundreds of new houses gone up over the last couple of years so plenty of new customers for them

Perhaps they don't realise?

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

More talk of Cable network expansion as Virgin Media completes refinancing scheme........

"According to the Financial Times, Virgin Media will now look to expand its cable network beyond the current level of 12.5m UK homes. The firm's new financial freedom will also enable it to cover the cost of reaching more un-cabled areas"

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/digitalt...ng-scheme.html

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

1.2% looks a very impressive churn figure. I wonder what they did to achieve that. :)

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

The re-financing report is very good news indeed. VM should not be afraid of going pole-strung in new areas (although new build areas may have planning restrictions on poles) and they can have fibre pass the home if not go into the home. They can certainly go out to villages on a pole-strung strategy.

So now I expect all these problems that are "with the planning team" to be cash-flow unlocked!

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

also maybe they can provide proper capacity now to heavy areas.

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

Or they could continue to choose not to given it's just going to get used up and the exercise repeated again as it was in your case :)

Does happen, don't be under any allusion that they aim to make the network congestion free. Line cards and additional fibres are expensive things to provision and areas where capacity just keeps getting eaten despite being well within planning guidelines in terms of bandwidth per home connected will be left.

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

it only gets eaten up when not enough is added. (drip feeding)

it also may help if they balance users a bit better, I see another port on my UBR has less congestion at 8pm on a saturday then mine does at 4am.

that is undefendable in my opinion just blatant excessive overselling. If you sell a unlimited product as an isp you have to be prepared to deal with some users using it as such.

making congestion free 24/7 you very well know is not what I am asking. Having it uncongested outside of peak hours is a reasonable expectation.

Also I would expect there to be similiar levels of quality across the entire customer base, as it stands you can have 2 customers paying the same wad of cash, one gets 0.5mbit and the other gets 20mbit. Something not right there.

VM are simply ringfencing problem areas off with what you describe.

I will repeat what I said before isp's like BE and easynet who have their own heavy users dont have customers with 50+ ms jitter downloading at dialup speeds due to congestion, they properly provision capacity, even if it means they make a operational loss. Cant fault them for that.

125kbit per customer allocated? on their guidelines? too low in 2010.

Re: VM to begin expanding its cable network
 

Not really, easily enough for most, the vast majority of service groups / nodes run just fine at this level of provision. Talk Talk and BT are running sub-30kbps. Talk Talk for example have over 4 million customers and use at peak about 100Gbit/s of bandwidth - 25kbps average per customer.

Be run at a loss in some cases due purely to having the largest telco in the world as a sugar daddy, prior to this they had congestion in various places on their network and are starting to show congestion again. Thanks to lighter O2 users the Be network is ok for a while, prior to this it was losing a ton of cash and had bandwidth problems. I can remember being on a group of nearly 30 exchanges that were all congested due to there not being enough bandwidth on the Be transport / core network.

Along with that oversupplying LLU backhaul is, in shorter term, simply cheaper than a node split and line card.

ISPs are businesses, they don't provision capacity if they think they'll make a loss on it longer term. Cost differential for Sky between 100Mbit, 1Gbit and 10Gbit is relatively small so as a general rule they took 1Gbit.

Check the price lists on www.openreach.co.uk for more information on why the LLU price comparison isn't a valid one. Going from 100Mbit to 10Gbit isn't a 100-fold price increase ;)

If, of course, you have some genuine data that shows that 125kbps / customer peak bandwidth isn't enough for Joe Average I'd welcome the correction. I think it can be taken as read that in some areas such as your stereotypical student areas it won't be enough due to usage patterns, 5 people sharing each CPE though only paying once, etc, though in those areas Virgin, ntl and Telewest's experience along with that of many other cable companies has shown that it just doesn't matter how much bandwidth you throw at the area it gets used up.

I can think of a VM area that was, 4 or 5 years ago, split down to less than 70 modems. Remember the tiers of service available at this time, and this area was still congested. A 10k (at the time) line card and pulling fibre to the cabinet, with the next step a brand new node construction and pulling yet more fibre. Really worth it to give two sets of 35 customers their full bandwidth to cane on newsgroups, P2P, etc?

I can also think of a foreign cableco that served university halls of residence, not large blocks I might add but fairly small apartments. They went as far as installing fibre into the basements to try and mitigate congestion and in the end gave up. Whatever capacity they added got eaten. They had areas with 500, 800 'standard' customers happily motoring along on their 10Mbit service with no capacity issues at all, while for these apartment blocks 50 - 80 customers was too many.

I have no idea how many modems are in your area, would be interesting to know.