Trial Invites for 1Gbps Virgin Media Broadband in Southampton

Cable ISP Virgin Media UK has begun to invite selected customers in Southampton (Hampshire) to help trial their new DOCSIS 3.1 network upgrade, which will boost the service’s top download speed to 1000Mbps (albeit only 50Mbps upload) on existing Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) and full fibre FTTP lines.

The trial forms part of last month’s announcement, which saw the operator pledge to deploy the 1Gbps DOCSIS 3.1 upgrade across their entire network (currently 15 million predominantly urban UK premises) by the end of 2021 and this will start in Southampton (here). Information leaked to us suggests that Manchester and Reading are likely to be next on the list, with Basingstoke and Bracknell to follow, but this is yet to be confirmed.

The DOCSIS 3.1 standard is able to achieve this extra speed by making several big improvements, such as harnessing the power of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) – used in all sorts of networks to split a single signal into multiple frequencies (each of which can carry data) – and improved error correction (Low Density Parity Check). On top of that it also boosts the radio frequency (spectrum) allocations.

In theory all of this should happen seamlessly without an engineer visiting your property (may sometimes still occur under trial conditions, as part of testing) and participants in the Southampton trial will just be sent a new Hub 4.0 router. We recently covered everything we know about the Hub 4.0 so far (here), but we now think their final design may be more akin to the rectangular SuperHub 2AC than the square Gigabit Connect Box.

Aside from a new router, the trial invite also promises that those who take part will not see any changes to their bill (i.e. you get to play with 1Gbps speeds for free, at least for a little while). As usual the operator will also be setting up a private trial-users-only corner of their Community Forum so that customers can provide feedback on their experience.

The invite asks selected customers – typically those who are on their community forum and have previously expressed an interest in joining future trials – to respond before the end of August. The development is good news for local Virgin Media customers, albeit possibly bad news for toob’s rival plan to make Southampton their first FTTH rollout city (here).

UPDATE 16th Aug 2019

Some people in Manchester also appear to be receiving invites, which seems to confirm the earlier leak of initial locations.