200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I don't know if anyone else has gone one but Virgin sent me a survey to fill out and it makes several mentions of a 200Mbit service:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2014/11/1.png

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2014/11/2.png

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2014/11/3.png

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2014/11/4.png

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2014/11/5.png

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2014/11/6.png

The final page mentioned the recent price increases, the whole thing seemed more interested in asking me about BT Sport so perhaps putting 2+2 together, the recent price increase is to pay for that. Yuck.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

sweet, I wonder whether somebody has put it on way too early by accident or whether a decisions is imminent. They'll normally announce speed upgrades in November with the initial rollout beginning in December and January so we are defo due for it anytime now.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

The most recent set up upgrades were announced in February and roll out of those still hasn't finished.

There are certainly upgrades coming next year, however 200Mb is news to me if it happens.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

This thing seems to happen quite a lot with surveys, I would think there'll be an announcement fairly soon.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

yeah, it is about time they announced something to keep up with the marketing and PR. They have defo done the work with all the downstream capacity upgrades and ongoing work with the upstream channel bonding and qam change to justify the new tier

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I just hope that, assuming this new tier is a thing (Igni doesn't seem to think so and I do value his opinion), they stick to the 10:1 download/upload ratio that the higher tiers have all had so far.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

The current top tier is 152 down, 12 up though?

---------- Post added at 20:35 ---------- Previous post was at 20:34 ----------

They haven't done all the work with the downstream capacity upgrades. The downstream capacity upgrades for next year's upgrades are still being prepared for the most part. The upgrades that have been done and are being done are capacity relief for the current tiers.

Unsure why they have to announce something to keep up with the PR. Most of the country can't get better than 76Mb from the competition.

EDIT: Let me ask someone who'd know about this - there were no plans for 200Mb last I heard, which was pretty recently.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I was going to say that as well. I can see it being 200/15


Because that is what the marketing guys like to do to keep up appearances. They have done it with all the previous tiers; they announce a new upgrade or speed boost before they have finished work on the current one. It makes VM look good and that they are staying ahead of the speed curve and giving customers stuff for free (before they announce a price increase ;))

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Okay - calm down, you ain't geting 200Mb imminently. As I mentioned the networks to support such a tier aren't in place yet. There are a single bunch of tier uplifts planned for next year, believe posts on here have been made regarding what the new top tier will be, and there's plenty to do before they can be delivered.

If I started blabbing other details I'd have my legs broken and be hung from a utility pole with coax.

You'll have to make do with 152Mb for now. The agony.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

It's all good, I am very happy and content with 152mbits. I know people think more is better but 152mbits is quite ample for me atm and with regards to the file size vs bandwidth proportionality we were talking about the other day, my speed has increased quicker than file sizes have over the last couple of years. I like the fact that the bandwidth is there if I need but truth be told, it will run at full whack for 8 mins or so in the morning while I download 3 or 4 files, it will probably run full whack uploading for an hour or so after and then run at 10% for the rest of the day. I knew when they first announced 152mbits that it would be more than I needed but I just like knowing it is there. A perfect example would be something like Steam. They had a cracking sale on over the weekend and one of my friends wanted me to get a game which was £6. Because it was an impromptu purchase I didn't have time to leave it downloading and come back to it later, I needed it doing there and then so I could play it immediately and at 15mb/sec I was able to play it after a quick wee and run downstairs for a drink. I am sure we all love the idea of having a gigabit connection just because it sounds so amazing but there is just no need for that kind of speed 24/7.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Why don't they do an option for slower but cheaper?

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

God you're a pain, Kush. Pasting such a large scale image screws up the display's horizontal scrolling!

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

That would be Sky Broadband Unlimited, TalkTalk or one of the many other ADSL options I believe :)

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

yeah, I saw an advert for Talktalk over the weekend for £1.50/month for the first 6 months

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Oh boobs, you are quite correct! My bad. Still, one can dream.

I know, right? :D

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Not if you have a 4K screen.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Trust you, Qasi!

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I wish. I don't have 4K display and even if I did I'd probably have to set the scaling to 400% or something just to be able to see what's on the damn screen!

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Not so funny on my old 1K lappy, even the reply box was off the RH side. :(

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Gonna do something about it in future, Kush?

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

He could start by reading the forum rules :-P

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I would edit the OP, but it won't let me :P

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

You need to add their phone line @ circa £17 per month, which makes that a lot of money for a shocking service...

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Fits fine @ 1080p with room to spare ;)

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Sure - but many if not most people have a partial window for their browser and it's a pain to have to do the extra step, indeed perhaps obscuring something you want to look at the same time.

Large images are an unnecessary pain.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Never seen anyone do this except on a Mac where you can't maximize easily and on 4K where it's pointless.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Interesting to see in Kush's opening post that 30Mb is mentioned. Wonder if that is going to be reintroduced?

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I'm guessing - but why would VM want to introduce a tier that is lower than the headline speed of BT Infinity Option 1?

That a 200 meg tier is coming seems certain to me.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Oh I don't know, perhaps because the whole reason 30Mb ever existed to begin with was in order to compete with BT Infinity option 1?

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Wonder if they might bring it back as a lower priced option to try and compete with the competion's ADSL packages? Kush's post quotes the price as £12.50 a month which is a great price for fibre BB and just a few quid more than some of the ADSL packages on the market.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

VM just started sending letters about price increases. Expect a "Free Upgrade" propaganda message to follow ;)

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

As I understand it the 30Mb was to 'compete' with ADSL2+, not FTTC.

Infinity 1 and 2 were paralleled by 60Mb and 100Mb when 30Mb was released.

VM will always compete by offering a higher headline speed.

Next year the higher tiers will be closer to Infinity 3 and 4 than 1 and 2. The lowest available tier may well beat Infinity 2 also on download performance.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

If true those numbers sound pretty ambitious, will the network be able to cope?

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

30Mb was expected to be "comparable or faster" than FTTC 36Mbps, they make no mention of ADSL2+ in their blurb. I don't see why they'd need to intro 30Mb to compete with ADSL2+ which being advertised at <=17Mbps, VM's 20Mbps already had a higher headline speed and in reality higher average speeds too (as long as you didn't use it at full speed for more than 15 minutes...).

VM themselves compare it to Infinity in their announcement (recall at the time 76Mbps FTTC had not yet been deployed):

http://www.virginmedia.com/informati...vmsrc=HP_30meg

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4...-to-30meg.html

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

In a notification that pricing was going up on 1 January 2015, I contacted CS and was offered a discount for 6 months. We excepted that.

However, also in this letter it states

"We've delivered even faster broadband speeds to you
We're committed to providing an unbeatable unbeatable broadband service. We're invested £13.5bn to keep bringing you the UK's fastest widely available network, and that's why we've been able to incresse our customers' speeds again..."

Looking at it this seems to relate to what they have done rather than what they are going to do.

However, I asked the lady I spoke to and was told that it will be changing again but nothing has been advised yet as to when and what the speeds will be next.

The page to look at is
www.virginmedia.com/speedupgrade

for more info. According to this there will be a change between April and June 2015 but no info is yet available.

Having seen the survey at the beginning maybe it will become 100, 152 and 200. Will be interesting to see what happens.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I am happy enough with my 150meg and personally see no point in having 200meg as download speeds are more than good enough.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Of course 150 meg is good enough. But big willy time is always here - on both sides. Plus if there is an upstream speed rise, that'll be highly attractive to many.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Logically, assuming the rule of 50% per stream (max 100Mb for the 4 stream modem), the 8 stream superhub is good for 200Mb on that basis.

Of course, with just 8 streams, 2 people running 200Mb speed tests at once would saturate them.
I'd guess there may be more than 8 streams, allocated according to load, or by simple round robin.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

There is no such rule

Given that the Superhub is not a SACM, looking at one specific aspect of the modem as an indicator of all the capabilities of every other part of the device is unrepresentative.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I understand what you are saying but if the chance came for me to upgrade I won't bother.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

That was intriguing me as well but I think he was trying to refer to net 50mbps (thus excluding DOCSIS overheads) per d/s 256QAM channel perhaps?.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

It's a reasonable assumption, with 50mbps per channel...
They offer 20 but not 30 over a single channel modem.
100 but not 120 over the 4 channel modem.
On that basis, the acceptable load based limit for the 8 channel superhub would be 200, as there seems to be a strong pattern for a maximum 50% usage of a channel by a single device.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

incorrect, you could have both on the vmng300, it is 152mbits which you needed a shub for because they didn't write a config file for the vmng300

absolutely and that is why I went for 152mbits to start off with and I'll get 200mbits as soon as I can. I can't think of many services I use that will let me download at ~30MB/sec but uploading at ~2MB/sec will be welcomed with open arms.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

That's not accurate, I'm afraid. You've reasoned yourself into a cul-de-sac.

At the current symbol rate and packing density (256QAM), each downstream channel has 55 meg/sec to share across all DOCSIS 3 users (i.e. all tiers). There is no 50% rule.

Incidentally a 4 channel modem is not constrained to 100 meg - but it's VM's policy not to let people on 120 or 152 have that old modem.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

But others do

They do offer 120 over the 4 channel modem.
They also offer 100 over a 3 channel system.

There is no such pattern.

And in case you missed it, all those previous devices were SACMs. The Superhub is not a SACM.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

There's no reason to think 200Mb won't be available on the current Superhub hardware, however 300Mb won't be.

These tiers won't be released on 8 channel systems but 12-16 channels, with individual 8 channel Superhubs being allocated to 8 of those channels.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

they sure do. I got my vmng300 back through the CEO's office when I got 100mbits and when they announced the speed doubling prog I was fully expecting them to say I can either stay on 100mbits or have a shub for 120mbits but a config dropped down for it and I had no probs getting full speed. I knew I would be pushing it with 152mbits which is why I let them send me a shub2. There was a thread going at the time where I posted all this but I can't be bothered to dig it up.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

As mentioned in another, and also recently confirmed to me, that the next uplift will be to 300mb

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

No way. 300mbits will be on docsis3.1 and they havent even started putting the infrastructure in place for that yet. The other thing to think about is the previous increases. In terms of % increase it wasnt a big jump going fron 100 to 120 and 120 to 152. They arent going to double the current top speed and go straight to 300mbits. To go with that they would also have to provide at least 20mbits upstream and they are still doing the work for that as well.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Just telling you what I was told, but it's a way off yet, as the extra capacity hasn't even been built into the Core yet. But that's what is coming.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Another doubling,perhaps. Be interesting if Virgin's tiers became 100/200/300.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Perhaps eventually, but as Ignition says the next set of modems with 12-16 channels will be more than capable of handling those speeds.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I wonder how the competition will react if that became the case...

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

It'll be on DOCSIS 3, and 3.1-ready infrastructure has been going in for a little while.

EDIT: https://www.comhem.se/bredband/bredbandspaket

Equipment Compal CH7284E

That is a 16 downstream, 4 upstream home gateway. Newer DOCSIS 3 kit is 24 downstream, 8 upstream capable. Your 152Mb is being delivered on 300Mb-400Mb of capacity, 24 downstreams delivers 1.2Gb. More than enough for 300Mb.

---------- Post added at 00:09 ---------- Previous post was at 00:06 ----------

I doubt BT will react as far as FTTC goes at all. They have never had any interest in competing with Virgin on speed and aren't going to start.

The only things I expect to see from BT are a 100Mb/30Mb vectored FTTC product, which is on the roadmap anyway, and for the 250,00-ish largely taxpayer subsidised Openreach FTTP premises release of a 1Gb product.

---------- Post added at 00:11 ---------- Previous post was at 00:09 ----------

This would be equivalent to their peers in the rest of the UPC / Liberty Global family's products for next year and is quite achievable with relatively little investment.

Doubling the speed will increase usage by no more than 30-40%.

---------- Post added at 00:11 ---------- Previous post was at 00:11 ----------

Indeed. It's why the E6ks are there.

EDIT: It's worth mentioning that another member of the UPC/LGI family, UPC Romania, sell only 200Mb and 500Mb, and provide a 24 channel gateway for the 500Mb. VM are a different proposition to the rest of the group, most similar to Ireland, but doubling the download speeds is happening and massive upload capacity increases are a work in progress.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

how very exciting

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Will this all boil down to (e.g.) THENRY still being thankful for crap Youtube? Or will things get worse and he'll have no Youtube buffering?

The point I make is more serious than an amusing dig. Do VM actually take into account a loading profile when constructing all this? And what target for experience do they aim to achieve?

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

The YouTube stuff is a specific issue which isn't related to any speed upgrades. Tends to be either problems with private peering or connectivity to hosted CDN.

Any access network upgrades in terms of bandwidth will be largely irrelevant to the browsing experience. That's dependent more upon latency, loss, jitter and the construction of the websites.

If you watch a website load it's a ton of really small transactions. In the case of VM none of this will even register on the downstream shaper, so more about the transactions flowing smoothly rather than quickly.

The people doing the uplifts have as their only job to deliver capacity :)

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

What are VM doing at their cabs ? In our area all the cabs have had tents over them with everything removed from the cab and new equipment being fitted and lines reconnected.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

A cab I reported last week is still wide open.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

sweet, sounds like some beefy upgrades

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Or the previous equipment was super old.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Not sure if related, but I gather a non-Netgear derived device is being tested for the VM Business cable service.

Maybe a hint of a change...

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Ongoing network maintenance/upgrade programme. They've been at it for quite a while!

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I'm shocked Virgin hasn't offered VoIP yet, it would seem to be a no-brainer. Then again, perhaps it's down to OFCOM being strict regarding telephony.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Yes. You need it to function in a power cut, hence you need to have battery backup on the eMTA itself and ideally on the nodes in the field.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

A cordless VoIP phone with a simcard for emergency backup would probably be the best option, especially if you end up owning your own mobile network. Normal cordless home phones won't work during a power outage, so it would actually be an improvement.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Mobile is not acceptable as a fixed-line replacement for better or worse. I would be in real trouble here where there's no reception on the ground floor and flaky reception on the other two.

People still demand their land line in some cases and it's a nice cash-cow.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Meh, FTTC and/or cable equipment is perfectly capable of being made to function in a power cut, I've done it myself in the past. Coupled with the fact most mobile networks now have or are working on WiFi and/or UMA to allow calling from any IP connected network, we have viable power-out calling capabilities as long as the internet can be kept up.

As they say... we have the technology...

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

i just hope we see some decent improvements to the upload speeds soon.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

It's the cost more than the technology to be honest.

BT's FTTC has batteries in each cabinet to cope with brief outages, VM can do much the same with their nodes and with any eMTA.

Still costs a few quid nonetheless, but hopefully offset by not having to pay BT Wholesale for PSTN.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I assume VM still have a lot of work to do on their infrastructure for upstream improvements? I am fed from the New Malden node and believe this ex-Telewest area was in poor state.

Not sure what state it is in now, but they did of course get upstream bonding working and we moved from TDMA to ATDMA, but still 16 QAM

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

That's precisely it, the cost. I believe that OFCOM come down hard if telephony services aren't kept up and fixed promptly. Particularly as there's a human life factor, quite a lot of people (elderly and disabled) rely on the phone line for lifeline serivces so a downed line could literally be the death of someone. That's one of the reasons why everything has battery backups.

The problem with a VoIP service is the battery backup would have to extend into the customer's property and keep their hub alive as well. I don't know if there's technology to do that.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

The battery is integrated into the hub. Plenty of those around - they are used in many other countries where the telco is delivered via CATV.

---------- Post added at 22:39 ---------- Previous post was at 22:38 ----------

It's probably in a better state than most in many ways given it had to be rebuilt for ATDMA.

No doubt some node splits / resegmentation left to do but that's business as usual as part of ongoing capacity upgrades.

That area was dire.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Right so to move to ATDMA required a rebuild then? Performance has been good I have to say since they did this work. I know there were delays in adding capacity since they had to do building work on the equipment rooms at the New Malden site to provide more rack space.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Yeah, the ex-Telewest London network was for the most part really not good. Some only had upstream bandwidth of 5-30MHz and downstream maxed out at 550MHz so needed rebuild.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

VM's Voice over Cable project is in the works, but is still very much in its infancy - it's got a name and that's about it at the moment.

VM will have to decommission the telephony network as it's just too old. Running on System X's 20odd years old, and other equally old kit.

But it's a cash cow for VM, it's paid for itself many times over and still brings in millions each year.

Voice over cable, or some other solution, will happen but I think VM will continue to eek out every last penny from the existing voice network until it expires.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Indeed, as I say we're quite capable of it, we just need the political or commercial will to actually spend money on doing it.

I did see a few people come by to take the batteries out of the mobile mast we have on our roof the other day, boy that was a huge pile of batteries, around two pallets worth - and I have no clue how often they have to do that.

---------- Post added at 11:11 ---------- Previous post was at 11:07 ----------

And yet, there's stories even on this very forum of people with medical equipment hooked up having faulty fixed-lines that took VM weeks or months to deal with.

The BT/Openreach FTTC modem already has a built-in plug for battery backup modules, most enterprise servers are equipped with battery backups on critical PCI(e) cards in addition to the grid itself - and I've run personal battery backups on telecoms equipment using just bog-standard consumer batteries and UPSes. The technology is all there - and even widespread - it's really no different to just shoving a phone battery onto the back of your modem. However 4 million+ phone batteries is going to be a bigger job to maintain than 4000 exchange backups...

There's also power-down-the-line technology (powering the connection through the broadband line itself, just like phones) but AFAIK that's not widely used.

---------- Post added at 11:17 ---------- Previous post was at 11:11 ----------

Wouldn't replacing it with newer/cheaper to maintain equipment and charging the same amount be an even bigger cash cow?

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

There's already a date for when retirement of the PSTN is planned, Pierre.

---------- Post added at 11:58 ---------- Previous post was at 11:56 ----------

Once the initial CapEx of the eMTAs and network resiliency upgrades has been recouped I'm sure it would. VM outsourced the PSTN network maintenance, etc, to BT Wholesale so will be glad I imagine to be rid of it.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

That's as maybe, but if you're hooked up as I think you are, you'll know that the voice over cable project is being pushed from one angle.

But the engineering experts in Access, the real ones, hate it. They'd much rather go for using MSANS to deliver VoIP amongst other things. We could still utilise the twisted pair infrastructure and not overload the HFC.

I don't think it's a done deal yet.

I don't know anyone that really enthuses about voice over cable.

Anyway, we'll see.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I think it is a great idea

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I think anything is better than the old phone line, it's another cable, another box on the wall.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Each VoIP call only needs 64kbps and relatively few punters use their landlines now so you'd hope it won't make a huge dent in the HFC.

MSANs are another active piece of powered kit in the network and one that'll need battery backup. They make perfect sense to sell business services and indeed FTTP on but unsure how good they are for residential areas passed by HFC.

The costs of installing a whole bunch of new cabinets would be non-trivial, unless VM could persuade customers to allow them to rip out the old transport network and replace it with MSANs in the same street furniture though that's perhaps a bit of a tough sell and Ofcom would be all over VM over the outage period.

It's tricky. There're not really many examples to follow as hardly anywhere else has any twisted pair at all in their cable network.

The mothership are quite enthusiastic about getting rid of the PSTN. Whether this happens via PacketCable or more active kit is I guess different. Both get rid of BT Wholesale.

The angle I heard is all geared up to PacketCable both for VoIP and future projects. It's essential in order to transfer to an all-IP network which, with DOCSIS 3.1 and whatever follows after, is where the company will end up being with video delivered by 100% IP multicast.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

The modem/router would have a port (E-MTA) as what Igni mentioned. You can plug the analogue phone into that. There would then be a QoS setting to guarantee the VOIP setting.

So end of Superhub eventually, perhaps.

EDIT: Nice noddy diagram: http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/EMTA

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Remember a lot of people out there still have adsl, the bottom tier will be for the low end of the market.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sephiroth
I'm guessing - but why would VM want to introduce a tier that is lower than the headline speed of BT Infinity Option 1?

That a 200 meg tier is coming seems certain to me.

Hi Chrys

Surely VM are only in the big willy game. 50/100/200 would seem to me to be the mainly marketed tiers. That gives them the scope to save up for 300meg and so on.

Don't you think?

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I do

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

The writer had been well briefed!

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

A friend just moved to Hong Kong as has opted for 500Mb for £20 rather than 1000Mb for £30. Installed in days too!

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

could and eventually being the operative words, with yet another multi-year-long complete network rebuild being required if it is ever going to happen.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Can and Will. well it is likely to be 2016 yes, And it will require some re-engineering work. I don't understand why you are coming across as it's something negative?

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Almost certainly will not.

Not before 2020. And will not be using DOCSIS 3.1.

Because it's wild exaggeration about a technology that will almost certainly never be used in the context described, as clearly stated in their own source:

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I got no idea what game they playing but I would be surprised if the most popular tier is not the lowest one, the market is still dominated by pricing.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

When your looking at an MSAN shelf costing approx £5500 just to give you 240 lines I know where it will be going

---------- Post added at 20:57 ---------- Previous post was at 20:53 ----------

There many areas to do still but these will be done first

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

240 lines at £15 a month and your costs are covered in less than two months, and the rest is just pure profit.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

The cost of upgrading the Telco transmission network is massive compared to the HFC in my opinion. The exchanges are obsolete and so is the Transmission network. The work to replace the shelves is not straight forward and would cost a fortune on its own.

---------- Post added at 21:27 ---------- Previous post was at 21:26 ----------

For one shelf! Yes but times that by thousands and the cost of the work to do it and thousands pounds more. Then the existing STM1 network has to be replaced with Broadgate in the cabinet and headend, more fibre needed for comm's to the MSAN shelves ect,ect. Maintenance contracts with Keymile, licences ect ect

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Yeah but for each thousand more shelves you're connecting 240,000 more lines thus bringing in more revenue... Two months' ROI on a piece of tech hardware is incredibly good by anyone's standards. Sure there are other costs but if a major piece of equipment has paid for itself in less than two months that leaves decades worth of revenue to cover the rest...

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

Don't disagree with that, but the Telco vendors change the equipment and after 5 years(approx) it's obsolete. Your then trying to engineer another solution to fit the the shelf and the differing connections ect into the cabinets again at a massive cost. The software used to connect to the shelves after a few years is then not supported for a decent amount of time which again causes problems. As there is kit out there that will only work on Wins 3.1. WINS 98 ect we are now on Win 10 nearly, laptop connections using serial ports now having to use USB-Serial and all the issues that brings when using corporate laptops.


The CATV network is so much easier to upgrade when you have different vendors to accommodate for.

Re: 200Mbit coming soon? (According to a survey)
 

I believe you'd have to build new cabinets for the MSANs, too?

These would need everything the BT street-side DSLAM cabinets have.

Is that £5,500 cost just for a chassis or for a single line card?

Would the mapping between old and new networks really be that direct or would there be a need to rearrange the copper network?