Surprise as ISP Virgin Media UK Halt 1Gbps Papworth FTTH Trial

A number of residents in the large Cambridgeshire village of Papworth Everard, which has a population of roughly 3000, claim to have been taken by surprise after Virgin Media’s four year old trial of a 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) broadband network suddenly came to a halt.

The trial was originally setup in summer 2014 as a way of testing the cable operator’s new narrow-trenching approach to civil engineering with the John Henry Group (here and here), which reduced the width of the trench used to lay fibre optic cables from 40cm to just 10cm. Normally Virgin Media wouldn’t target such a small community but in this case their infrastructure already passed through the area and that made it viable.

On top of that the area also became the first on their network to test a 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) service, which was used to connect around 100 homes and many of those reported speeds of up to 800-900Mbps (Megabits per second). All of this occurred just ahead of the operator’s official Project Lightning launch in February 2015 (here).

Since then the network has continued to run and until very recently the locals had still been enjoying the pleasingly fast connectivity. Sadly all that changed a few weeks ago. Without any warning the FTTH connection suddenly went down and this time it didn’t come back up again. Residents had previously been warned to expect occasional downtime as part of the trial but nothing like this.

One Resident told ISPreview.co.uk (Anonymously):

“A few villagers posted on Facebook that it was off and was it just them or everyone and we came to the conclusion it was down for all users on the trial. Then a couple of local VM engineers replied but nothing from Virgin Media in any official capacity to the villagers on the trial, no formal communication about why it had gone off and if it would be back on.

Eventually one of the VM engineers posted on FB saying there had been an equipment failure at the VM exchange and due to the cost it would not be fixed, so trial over, but again no formal communication from VM just a post on FB by a local engineer trying to be helpful.”

We did some checking with another person who is known to be on the trial and they similarly confirmed that the service had stopped functioning. Luckily customers on the trial were also supplied with a traditional Hub 3.0 router, which meant that they could just go back to the old service (i.e. there was no charge for the 1Gbps service on top of their standard package).

Nevertheless those affected are now mourning the loss of speed.

A Spokesperson for Virgin Media told ISPreview.co.uk:

“In 2014, we started a small six-month trial to test narrow-trenching technology and trial new in-home and network equipment. This trial was completed successfully and after being extended for nearly four years, has now ended.”

The development is somewhat unexpected, particularly given VM’s stated intention to extend their fledgling FTTH/P based infrastructure out to 2 million premises under the £3bn Project Lightning network expansion by around 2019 or 2020. This will deliver a total of 4 million extra premises passed, albeit with the other half being traditional hybrid coax + fibre DOCSIS.

Sadly Virgin Media did not answer our question about the alleged equipment failure in their exchange, although the operator has said that they’re now in the process of contacting customers on the trial to update them and arrange to collect any unused kit. Still being left with the option of a top connection speed that can reach 350Mbps is hardly terrible.