From an industry newsletter:
Quote:
Lessons Learned
Most operators familiar with DOCSIS 3.0 launches advise their engineering peers to get their DOCSIS 2.0 plant ready first, and to not go directly from 1.x to 3.0. That's because most of DOCSIS 2.0 involves the upstream plant - making it capable of supporting a wider channel width (6.4 MHz), and a stronger modulation (64-QAM) than the original QPSK.
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Virgin didn't do this, they were in a hurry to get the headline grabbing 50Mbit downstream speed out in the open so they skipped the upstream upgrades and are only now starting to do then with the threat of BT's 40Mbit/10Mbit and 100Mbit/10Mbit services beginning to be rolled out.
Do not expect to see higher upstreams from Virgin until early next year, and what they will be is unsure at this time though 10Mbps is apparently the target, however there is going to be quite a bit of work to do in some areas, so it will be a somewhat staggered rollout. Purely at the local level in some areas it will take considerably more man hours to deploy these higher upstreams than it did to deploy the 50Mbit downstream, in others it'll be relatively painless.
In summary the upstreams are low due to Virgin not really caring about them until now, so they never really did the work to enable it. They are now, however, suddenly starting to care, BT press releases about having faster upload speeds do that