Well I strongly disagree with that as I'm sure most people are will be when they pay for 20mb or 50mb broadband and get nowhere near it.
New fiber optic BT broadband £19.00 per month
- Thread starter jimmy321
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Well I strongly disagree with that as I'm sure most people are will be when they pay for 20mb or 50mb broadband and get nowhere near it.
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Coax is copper wire! Tell you what, you try taking a 100m toslink cable and a 100m coax audio cable. Come back and tell which works.
Coax is only deployed because when it was deployed fibre was far more expensive than it is today.
What are they installing in new builds purposely for internet - that'd be fibre.
What was phased out of LAN use in favour of twisted copper pairs 15 years ago - that'd be coax.
That virgin are making it work to a point and might squeeze 200Mbit out of it yet doesn't mean it's any good. Fibre is the future, it's far superior to coax or any other copper infrastructure.
All of which adds up to the fact that virgin describing their broadband as fibre optic is not only misleading (you've bought it obviously) but just plain wrong.
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Correct, unfortunately the likely future infrastructure will be PON (passive optical networking) which is another broadcast style medium. It's a cheap way of deploying fairly high speed (Gigabit PON is available and tested this minute) over long distances without massive infrastructure (passive so no power required in cabinets). That CPE is relatively expensive is the main downside...
Someone paying for 50Mbit DSL would imply FTTC and therefore VDSL2. In which case this is a totally reasonable sync speed. Whether their ISP of choice can provide that speed is a totally different question, of course.
20Mbit would generally imply ADSL2+ technology, which isn't being used in FTTC. Therefore the copper line length would be far greater and yes, generally, the vast majority of people hoping for 20Mbit on ADSL2+ are going to be disappointed. It would be funny to see coaxial cable do what ADSL2+ does over two rusty twisted pairs of copper though.
I know Coax contains copper (hence the Co, ax twised at the axial) but Coax is not just some copper wire like BT Telephone wire, it has a lot more bandwidth.
Squeeze 200mb? No way, it could probably handle hundreds of MBytes, never mind bits.
The "co" in "coaxial" doesn't stand for copper. In fact, coaxial isn't even an acronym. The word coaxial is of similar meaning to "twisted pair". It refers to the way coaxial cable is constructed with an outer shielding layer that intertwines upon itself.
I'd love to see whether Sky channels inc HD in 1080p and digital sound could be delivered via ADSL too!
at the same time as internet access.
200Mbit/s I'm sure isn't a problem for coaxial over 100 or 200 meters. But twisted pair can do that too.
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OK, btw here, I'm a network architect, I design these sorts of networks for a living. 200Mbit over DOCSIS3 is a hack, it requires 4 channels to do that. Upgrading means going straight to 8 channels and 400Mbit, which simply isn't practical with what VM have in the ground currently (and they aren't laying more, they nearly went bankrupt laying this lot).
Coax simply will not realistically and practically handle much more, fibre will currently handle 100Gbit on a single wavelength, or 12.8Tbit/s on a single fibre pair at the top end. Coax is only in use because it's already in the ground, nobody in the industry is under any illusion that's in any way desirable.
Technically I also much prefer xDSL standards over cable standards which are uniformly hacky and technically inelegant.
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No fttc/ftth on the Horbury and Ossett exchange. 
+1
Nothing beats point-to-point topology networks. As soon as BT's VDSL2+FTTC starts exceeding cable coverage there will come a point when cable will get knocked off its pedestal. The only reason cable has had such a good reputation for "fast internet" over the past 2 decades is simply because cable has always had the "to the cabinet" topology in the first place. Sure it hasn't always had fibre to the cabinet. But it has always had some form of high bandwidth copper connection to the cabinet. And from there it runs its broadcast operation to the rest of the street(s) using plain old shared coaxial cable.
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I appreciate bandwidth is expensive. Cogent are indeed ****, but I would have thought it cost considerably more than £1 per mbit per month, nearer 20x that I thought? I guess it comes down to individual peering agreements.
I don't want unlimited 1Gbit personally, that amount of bandwidth would be far greater than even 100 home users needs.
Keeping in mind 1mbit per month is around 380GB of Xfer is it not? 10mbit of dedicated bandwidth would be near enough 4TB...
I can happily say I've downloaded nowhere near 380GB let alone 4TB in a month.
I want a connection with a huge burst, but only to pay for what I use. Like a car I can cruise in, but still go at 200mph when I put my foot down.
The technology is there, it's just too many people with fingers in all sorts of pies.
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Indeed, our £1/mbit pricing with cogent is exceptionally good because we have a big commit. Decent providers like level3/sprint are more like £4-5/mbit.
I know you're point about what the need for total download costs rather than peak bandwidth but unfortunately as an ISP you can't buy those terms, it's per mbit on 95th percentile billing and that's it!
There is an easy way to achieve what you're looking for, it's called contention, but people don't like it because they all want to use their connection at the same time.
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I'm not convinced unfortunately as to the future. Virgin can (and will, against better judgement) use multiple channels to get 200Mbps over current DOCSIS3 equipment, on the other hand VDSL2 still isn't deployable at better than 100Mbps (deployable that is, there's plenty of lab testing going on).
FTTP will need to happen, but aside from PON (with all of it's broadcast ugliness) there's currently no viable way to deploy it...
By the time FTTH becomes worth it, something better will be out...I don't think it'll ever get deployed to VM coverage levels.
I personally think Coax as the final point in the distribution network will be fine. We're on DOCSIS3.0 and that will always get better, if not another standard coming alltogether to replace DOCSIS for the same cable.
VM is disablling analogue channels in February, that too will help bandwidth.
I actually wish BT would do something years after taking so much money and making barely any investment. But they won't because the company is practically insolvent.
NTL/VM has been Digital Britain's saviour.
I personally think Coax as the final point in the distribution network will be fine. We're on DOCSIS3.0 and that will always get better, if not another standard coming alltogether to replace DOCSIS for the same cable.
VM is disablling analogue channels in February, that too will help bandwidth.
I actually wish BT would do something years after taking so much money and making barely any investment. But they won't because the company is practically insolvent.
NTL/VM has been Digital Britain's saviour.
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I think once FTTC is deployed, the last legs will be replaced over time, new builds will all by FTTP, i would hope - when they built our business park (probably 20-30yrs ago) they put a 20-pair multicore (copper) into each building, applying the same attitude now would pay dividends later.
The trouble comes in being able to supply a copper pair for telephone - we have an expectation that the phone will work during a power cut, i suppose you could supply one copper pair and fibre to every premesis - but thats a lot more expensive than just fibre.
its all good having FTCC etc but will bt lower its current 100gb limit on the unlimited service? I work as an Openreach engineer and the NGA/21cn stuff is progressing as quickly as possible but with no further recruitment, current engineers retraining and maintaining the current network it is mission impossible imho!!!
just meeting the current demand on copper for repairs and installs is really taking its toll (mostly due to the quality of the current plant and if I am honest demands on engineers)
time will tell but at this moment in time I am very sceptical
just meeting the current demand on copper for repairs and installs is really taking its toll (mostly due to the quality of the current plant and if I am honest demands on engineers)
time will tell but at this moment in time I am very sceptical
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Do you work for them?
They're hated in the industry, hated by business (try getting anywhere with NTL business) and fairly famous for their useless customer service. Even if their technology was any good they'd be a million miles from a 'digital saviour'. I've really no idea what virgin cool aid you drank.
The infrastructure seems a mess to me... atleast 3 days a month signs of congestion in the core network are creeping in with high pings on certain nodes... when peak time traffic managed theres all sorts of application issues i.e. if anything is updating on steam all other internet traffic disconnects. Frequent bounts of high pings or packetloss and I'm being routed all the way around the country to get out on the internet Somerset->Sheffield RAS->Ilford/ealing - explain that one :S
Bigredshark or anyone else with enough knowledge, care to make any predictions about how BT and VM will advance their infrastructure over the next 5 years? I assume BT will just keep deploying FTTC, but can VM do anything other than just trying to fiddle around with the current infrastructure trying to get higher speeds out of an aging network?