ISP KCOM Upgrades Customers to Symmetric FTTP Broadband Speeds
Hull-based broadband ISP KCOM, which has spent the past few years building a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across parts of East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in England, has begun upgrading their packages to support symmetric speeds. But only up to a maximum upload speed of 500Mbps.
The change, which started to be deployed from 20th January 2025 (credits to Phil for the news tip), means that all KCOM packages up to 500Mbps will now offer fully symmetrical upload and download speeds. For packages above 500Mbps, upload speeds will be capped at 500Mbps and so aren’t fully symmetric (although we doubt people will moan too much about a 500Mbps upload rate).
The upgrade “comes at no extra cost, delivering enhanced experience and performance“, said a KCOM spokesperson to ISPreview. The move doesn’t come as too much of a surprise because the operator had already promoted some similar changes at the wholesale level.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Isn’t it a bit risky offering 500Mb upload speeds when you only have a GPON network?
Maybe Openreach will follow suit if it’s possible.
Not much more than offering 1Gb+ download speeds on GPON. Also depends on the contention ratio KCOM are using (Openreach use 32:1 and are supposed to be launching symmetric this year).
I’ve just tested mine and indeed capped at 500Mbps for higher packages, I do wonder why they did this instead of offering symmetrical for all packages like there competitors like connexin and MS3 and its resellers.
At a guess they are using GPON which only has 1.2G upload between all customers on the same PON (up to 30 with BT). Limiting to 500M reduces the chances of the upload becoming saturated by a few heavy users
Because gpon is the underlying technology and it’s not really ‘safe’ to be offering the full upload capacity of a pon to any one user.
If they’re not using XGSPON then it will be for capacity I’d imagine.
As far as I know kcom added faster uploads to GPON rather than upgrading to XGS-PON that they said they would do years ago in an article on this site.
Maybe Mark could confirm with Kcom?
@Mark1
Was that promise before the takeover by Macquarie Group?
If the rumours of them wanting to sell up are true, then spending money on the core network is probably the last thing they want to be doing
Upload increase email sent out just a few hours after the one where they advise that their prices are going up by £3 in two weeks.
Ahh legacy GPON, just like BT. Dinosaur companies offering dinosaur products 🙂
For those of us on copper, nothing fibre seems like a ‘dinosaur’ product. There are some people out there still on ADSL!
True, but nothing wrong with expecting BT to deploy non-legacy products, especially as other operators been doing XGS-PON for some years now and BT still deploy GPON to this date, albeit with tony caveat that a small trial starting April/May will look at XGS-PON for gigabit symmetric. One of the famous BT trials in a new area, that gets extended and extended….you know the rest. Meanwhile, competition in a number of areas started this years ago…