Virgin Media UK Trial Smart WiFi Upgrade for Broadband Routers

ISPreview.co.uk has learnt that cable ISP Virgin Media have recently started inviting selected customers to take part in a secret new “broadband trial” (VMBW2) for Smart Wi-Fi technology, which aims to boost the overall network performance and improve connectivity to WiFi enabled devices.

At this stage we don’t know a huge amount about what is being tested, although it comes in the form of a firmware upgrade for the operator’s Hub 3.0 (SuperHub v3) cable routers and from the information we’ve seen it appears to be an implementation of something similar to, or the same as, AirTime Fairness (ATF) technology.

ATF is a kind of congestion management feature that has been around in some, but not all, WiFi networks for years and it tends to be optional (i.e. routers may disable it by default). Essentially ATF is designed to better manage your wireless network airwaves / traffic between multiple users (being fair with the sharing of capacity), although it may also reduce the performance for some users (e.g. those on slow / old devices).

Modern WiFi networks are getting better at sharing capacity and managing “airtime” congestion, thus many people may not require ATF to be enabled. However some environments, particularly busy ones with lots of users and wireless networks or devices (especially if you have a mix of older/ slower WiFi devices and newer / faster ones), may find this to be a useful improvement when enabled.

A Virgin Media Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“We are in the process of trialling a number of exciting features as part of our continued investment to improve connectivity in our customers’ homes. We’ll keep customers updated once we have more information to share.”

At this stage it’s unclear whether Virgin Media eventually intend to deploy the upgrade to all of their hubs (old and new) or even if they will enable it by default. Equally, being a trial, it’s possible that the so-called “Smart WiFi” feature may never see the light of day but that seems unlikely.