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Virgin Media O2 Upgrade 90 Percent of UK Network to 1Gbps

Tuesday, Nov 9th, 2021 (9:15 am) - Score 16,968
virgin_media_gigabits_van

Broadband ISP Virgin Media (VMO2) has today switched-on gigabit broadband capability (1130Mbps downloads and 52Mbps up) for another 1.6 million UK homes, which means more than 90% of their entire network has now been upgraded to the DOCSIS 3.1 standard. The remaining 1.2 million should follow by the end of this year.

The last batch of areas to be upgraded include Lincoln, Bath, Lancaster, Fife, Huddersfield, Ipswich, Slough, Salisbury and many others that have not been specifically named (the list would be very long if they included all of them). Prior to today, the operator had already upgraded 12.8 million of their covered premises to the new cable standard, and this has now hit 14.3m (VM’s network covers a total of 15.5m premises).

NOTE: D3.1 utilises enhancements like Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), which can encode data by using multiple carrier frequencies, and boosts the amount of radio spectrum up to 200MHz. This also supports other enhancements, like Distributed Access Architecture / Remote Phy (R-PHY) – here and here.

Until today, a good chunk of VMO2’s customers on the operator’s existing EuroDOCSIS 3.0 based Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) and Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network could already access top ultrafast speeds of c.630Mbps (Ultimate Oomph TV bundle), but by adopting the D3.1 standard they’ve been able to significantly boost the downstream performance up to 1Gbps (potentially hitting 2Gbps+ in the future).

Virgin Media now has one final upgrade (c.1.2 million premises) left to do before completing their rollout to all 15.5 million of their covered premises by the end of 2021, which, when combined with rival Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) deployments from other operators, could push the UK coverage of gigabit-capable broadband networks to around 60-65% (currently 58%).

Lutz Schüler, CEO of VMO2, said:

“We’re making great strides ahead in upgrading the UK and are within touching distance of bringing the benefits of future-proof gigabit broadband to everyone on our network.

With our gigabit rollout progressing at an unmatched pace, we’re building the next-generation broadband network that’s ready for the technology of tomorrow.”

However, at present the extra speed will only benefit the downstream side of broadband performance, which is because uploads are still stuck on the older D3.0 standard. The operator does intend to go back and upgrade their entire fixed line network – c.14.3 million premises in existing HFC areas (with the rest on full fibre) – to FTTP by the end of 2028 (here), but that’s a long time to wait.

Otherwise, customers who take out the related Gig1Fibre package from Virgin Media today will usually be sent a D3.1 capable HUB 4.0 (TG3492LG-VMB / Gigabit Connect Box) router, and you can see the specification for that in this article. But they’ve also just launched a much more capable HUB 5.0 (Sagemcom F3896LG-VMB) router (details), albeit technically still more of a pre-launch trial.

Prices for the new 1Gbps broadband package typically start at £62 per month (standalone broadband) on an 18-month term and come attached to a guaranteed price freeze for at least 24 months. Customers can also take this alongside their various Pay TV and phone bundles, albeit at extra cost.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 and .
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Comments
48 Responses
  1. Avatar photo Paul says:

    Upload speeds are a joke

    1. Avatar photo Bob says:

      Upload speeds are faster than my download speeds.

      Jokes on me I guess.

  2. Avatar photo Peter sharpen says:

    1gbps at £62 a month no thanks I wouldn’t touch virgin media 02 again with 10 ft barge poll ever again .

    1. Avatar photo Sam P says:

      In some areas, like mine, £62 is lower than anyone else.

  3. Avatar photo mike says:

    Still nothing in Norwich although they are carrying out some kind of work tomorrow

    1. Avatar photo Oddsandmods says:

      That’s what happened in Yarmouth last month, week later I could order 1gig

  4. Avatar photo Randy says:

    And as usual, you don’t need upload speed ? nah everyone just needs gigabit down. What’s that? you send files, upload videos… then you’re the 0.0000001% and all the shills on here will surely say it’s bad that you want upload bandwidth.

    1. Avatar photo WibbledOff says:

      Sorry to say this, but your percentage is from the 90’s. Hopefully you and VM will join the rest of us in the 21st century soon.

    2. Avatar photo anonymous says:

      Isn’t bad at all, just isn’t realistic for VMO2 to offer more in a number of areas, and the move to FTTP means no business case to do more upgrades to the hybrid cable network after the current wave.

      A reminder their network is a cable TV network. People only share 100-160 Mb of total upload capacity while download direction it’s more like 2.6-2.8 Gb.

      They’re moving to symmetrical FTTP as the next big upgrade. Before then might see a 2G/100M product thanks to some minor hardware changes but no major upgrades once everything has Gig1 available.

    3. Avatar photo Randy says:

      @WibbledOff . Sarcasm detection isn’t your thing is it.

    4. Avatar photo Randy says:

      @anonymous if it’s not viable , why does their parent company liberty global offer MUCH higher uploads in other EU countries?

    5. Avatar photo anonymous says:

      They resell others’ FTTP, or if over cable service is heavily contended and an ‘up to’.

      Show me where they offer significantly more than 50 Mb/s over cable, other than Switzerland, if you would? They have operations in UK, Ireland and 5 other nations only as far as I know.

      UK will overtake Switzerland as UK is going all fibre, Switzerland largely DoCSIS 4.

    6. Avatar photo mike says:

      @anonymous

      Why don’t you think we’ll see higher uploads than 100Mb? I understand there’s limited upstream capacity, but to even get 1Gbps downstream they’ve rolled out DOCSIS 3.1. Uploads are still DOCSIS 3.0. They can get loads more upstream capacity by switching the upstream to DOCSIS 3.1 too. They could then easily offer 1000/200 and 2000/400 to compete with BT.

    7. Avatar photo Winston Smith says:

      Apparently NOS in Portugal started to implement DOCSIS 3.1 OFDMA upstream last year to improve upload speeds during the pandemic.

      Does anyone know what speed they managed to achieve?

    8. Avatar photo henry says:

      Winston Smith, some European operators have begun offering 500 Mbps upstream. In order to do that, they have made a large upgrade, expanding the upstream spectrum from 65 MHz to 204 MHz – the high-split.

      You cannot offer this kind of speed without upgrading the split. A simple deployment of OFDMA in the existing plant is not enough.

    9. Avatar photo anonymous says:

      The other issue is what about the modems that don’t support OFDMA upstream, everything below the Hub 4?

      Can’t just switch off all the 3.0 upstream capacity, it’ll have to be migrated across with the OFDMA block probably starting off pretty low down in the spectrum, the bits too noisy for SC-QAM / 3.0 upstream channels.

      VMO2’s networks run in a 5-65 MHz range. A rough estimate would say they’ll get at most perhaps 250 Mbps out of that spectrum. The last time they sold half over the upstream capacity to a single customer, the original 100/10 service, it didn’t go well. They’ll be wanting to ensure a single heavy user can’t eat the entire area’s capacity so 100 is a realistic maximum.

      As a guide, in existing areas that run on 5-65 MHz they get ~160 Mbit/s from them if they fill all the efficiently usable capacity. They don’t tend to sell the 55 Mbps Gig1 comes with on less than 6 upstream channels of area capacity. Keeping to that capacity planning 100 Mbps would be reasonable.

      They are not going to upgrade the network to the 5-85 MHz upstream mid-split now: they’re going to be offering higher upload speeds than those available with the existing network via FTTP.

      Chances are they’ll reclaim the lower spectrum including the lowest 2 upstream channels, where noise is highest, and use that for OFDMA while seeding Hub 4 and Hub 5 into the network to move customers on higher tiers onto the OFDMA.

      Lose 54 Mbps from DoCSIS 3.0 capacity, gain 18 Mbps from 3.1 on the same spectrum, then gain another maybe 80 Mbps from the newly used lower spectrum.

      162 – 54 + 18 + 80 = 206 Mbps. Some areas will deliver closer to 250 Mbps than others as it’s dependent on how clean the networks are but they can’t really make assumptions so have to run with a reasonable estimate.

  5. Avatar photo Meadmodj says:

    Minimum Guaranteed speed is 565 Mbps and this is very likely if my past experience of VM is anything to go by. But at least they guarantee to maintain the 52 Mbps to be 50 – 52 Mbps.

    BT only guarantees 10Mbps up on FTTP and other ISPs don’t appear mention it.

    As always upload is not just the distribution technology

    1. Avatar photo Dom says:

      Do they actually guarantee the upload.? Where did you find that information.?
      My upload regularly drops below 50mbps and I’ve seen it go as low as 9Mbps once.
      And that is when seeding torrents which is giving it the best chance as when doing speed tests, uploading files, streaming Plex/Emby media from home it’s even worse.

    2. Avatar photo Meadmodj says:

      Perhaps guarantee is to stronger a word. But at least they expect it to maintained during peak times. https://www.virginmedia.com/shop/broadband/speeds

  6. Avatar photo rich says:

    1130Mbps download and 52Mbps upload – £62 a month – NO DEAL
    1130Mbps download and 1130Mbps upload – £32 a month – DEAL

    1. Avatar photo anonymous says:

      @rich, Your price of £32 would be seriously not viable. Lots of other [long term] operators are charging much more than that for less. We would all like £32 for symmetric gig service! That would mean lower tiers at virtually give away prices too, despite the various taxes on fibre/infrastructure.

    2. Avatar photo Brin says:

      our village has 1 gig ( 960 up, 950 down) for £30/ month . Same as Barn

    3. Avatar photo D Maddox says:

      Wolverhampton may have optic fibre but its not even connected to premises.. Virgin are all talk.. Snail and they should call it.

  7. Avatar photo DaveIsRight says:

    Can some tech savvy member of this site explain to me why upload bandwidth is still always so limited? I imagine it’s because there is a fixed total bandwidth and they split it up according to what most people use. If that’s the case why wouldn’t they also offer, for example, a 500/500 service? Surely the line is the same in both directions? In the days of SDN and all digital infrastructure isn’t is just a config somewhere on some equipment?

    I don’t really understand how with FTTP and cable it’s all still so heavily restricted. I would imagine there is a small but significant number of people who’d much prefer 500/500 over 1000/50?

    1. Avatar photo Chris says:

      for dsl & cable the data is transmitted using different frequencies, frequencies are divided between up and down. due to interference from adjacent cables it’s not really practical to use down frequencies for upload.

      for dsl there used to be sdn products that where 2mb in both directions but are largely outdated tech now & I think it used 2 lines.

      on cable, the network was designed for transmission of video cheaply and efficiently, it had huge reliance on cheap amplifiers that boosted signals down to consumers, it turned out to be possible to amplify analogue tv signals without loosing too much quality, later advances meant the same was possible for digital tv signals including now broadband. it doesn’t work properly in reverse due to the way the amplifiers work. Its why cable networks use RFOG for transmitting over fibre which is otherwise typically seen in undersea fibre as its the most reliable way to transmit without regenerating the bit pattern but at some point the signal becomes too degraded to be read. It’s because the RF is amplified using cheap amplifiers in a similar way that the cable net has always worked.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial#Final_connection_to_customers

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Comparison

    2. Avatar photo sebbb says:

      It is limited because of the retrocompatibility with DOCSIS3.0 upstream spectrum. To refarm that and enable higher upload speeds, every cable modem should be compatible with DOCSIS3.1. This means they would have to get every customer on a Hub 4 or Hub 5. I don’t think that’s likely to happen soon, given they never gave that Hub to lower tier customers and now there’s a global shortage of silicon…
      I am quite tired too of those limits, but until Virgin are the best option in the area… and tbh London’s single houses are pretty much left with waiting Openreach.

    3. Avatar photo Winston Smith says:

      Virgin’s network is built to a data protocol called DOCSIS which is asymmetric by design, between 10:1 and 5:1 for DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1.

      The Gigabit upgrade uses 3.1 on the downstream side only. To migrate the upstream channel to 3.1 would require network hardware upgrades to improve bandwidth – one Virgin test managed to acheive about 2.2 Gps down/ and 220 Mbps up.

      As VMO2 are planning to replace the whole HFC network with FTTP by 2028 they are unlikely to invest large amounts in the exsiting hardware.

      So no, sysmetric speeds aren’t possible by simply editing an .xml file

    4. Avatar photo Randy says:

      So the cable network it uses is designed for TV, i.e you just “listen”. Couple that with the fact that most users care way more about download speed than upload speed and therefore you get networks designed and sold at a price that reflects it’s use. Bandwidth costs money in both directions.

      However, there is ZERO technical reason why VMO2 could not offer much higher upload like in the regions of 100mbit upload speed and no before someone says it , you can do this with DOCSIS 3.0 you don’t need 3.1 to do 100mbit upload. There have been plenty of networks doing this on 3.0 (e.g. UPC/KPN spring to mind).

      So yeah, we can see why they designed them this way. We can see why they sell them this way. What I cannot understand is this idea that you don’t need more than 30-50mbit of upload. The thing about the internet and technology is it changes, and thus our usage of it changes as well. 10 years ago people were not uploading 8K videos to youtube or you couldn’t run a business editing videos for people and then uploading the files .. but now you can so networks need to update themselves and reflect it.

      All we are asking for is the option. If we are such special people because we don’t want our 1TB video file upload to take an entire day to upload, then just offer a package with a higher speed at a higher cost. Then the majority of your network users can pay for high download and slow upload and those that want faster can pay for faster upload.

      They can do it now. Zero technical reason why not. Now watch certain regulars defend VM and call everyone who says we need more upload a “snowflake” or something similar.

    5. Avatar photo Meadmodj says:

      Cost to them and hence price to us (plus profit).

      If you have any technology where the capacity is finite then if the cost difference is high why would design a network whether Broadband, TV or mobile to provide symmetrical when the usage profile is asymmetric. This applies to both the distribution and back haul networks.

      In addition is the cost of bandwidth connectivity to the Internet.

      Once you have committed to an asymmetric design it is costly to offer symmetrical. HFC, RFoG, HFC and first generation GPON as services are asymmetric to meet the current and forecast design. Those using Enterprise or XGSPON are able to offer symmetrical but the same principles apply. It is up to the provider and allowing unrestrained upload can impact the service to others and may encourage bad practice. Some Altnets are chancing their arm and time will tell whether their model is justified. As protocols and kit improve then providers will be offering symmetrical products but these are likely to be targeted for a specific business SLA.

      I personally want the resilience and consistency of Full Fibre but I don’t want to pay for capacity I am unlikely to need routinely. With XGSPON I am hoping for products that can allow a burst mode for a short period if and when I may need it.

    6. Avatar photo sebbb says:

      Oh and actually what I and Chris explained is for cable. For FTTP it’s only marketing/business decision. In Italy on vodafone you get 2500/500 for 29€ a month…
      Soon the incumbent there will publish their 2500/1000 profile for 35€ and they are experimenting 10G/2G on XGS-PON for 50€ a month in 11 cities.

    7. Avatar photo Meadmodj says:

      Whilst we do pay more than other European countries their landscape is very similar to ours. Some have access to multiple Gigabit but others are still on slower technologies and some in Italy are still on dialup.

      Like most things in the UK the price is not based on cost and a reasonable return but what the market will stand. Although Altnets are keen to compete I don’t see them dropping their prices other than certain exceptions like B4RN.

      Whether we like or not OR an VM are following an Ultrafast Asymmetric strategy although their XGSPON overlays will follow quite quickly.

    8. Avatar photo henry says:

      sebbb, XGS-PON has a shared capacity of ~8.3 Gbps downstream (when overhead has been removed), so a true 10 Gbps tier is not possible, not even on next-gen residential fiber.

    9. Avatar photo sebbb says:

      @Meadmodj I know there are areas and areas, I am italian – but living in London
      However, with EU funds Italy is building public owned, rural FTTP everywhere there was not an alternative option to DSL. It means that in my village (~1600 people) my family has a 1G/300M for 29€, me in London have to shell out £62 for less.
      @henry well that’s actually because in the UK it is mandatory to advertise average speeds, in Italy they advertise peak performance. The incumbent specifies the net bandwidth only in the wholesale documentation (stating ~8500Mbps downstream on PPPoE).

    10. Avatar photo anonymous says:

      ‘However, there is ZERO technical reason why VMO2 could not offer much higher upload like in the regions of 100mbit upload speed and no before someone says it , you can do this with DOCSIS 3.0 you don’t need 3.1 to do 100mbit upload.’

      Randy – to do this safely requires 8 upstream channels of 6.4 MHz each. How do you propose VM do this when virtually none of the plant has a clean 51.2 MHz to locate these signals?

      VM’s in-home installations have an upstream band of 5-65 MHz. Other non-broadband signals and noise take the spectrum 5-22.4 MHz, leaving 42.6. VM use virtually all of this in their 6 channel areas, in many cases the first channel running at 2/3rds capacity due to the noisier spectrum down there.

      With respect I’m not convinced you do understand the technical side here. VM could sell 100 now, sure, just that one customer could consume the 2/3rds of the entire area’s capacity and bring things to a halt. That might be tolerated in some nations but it’s not in the UK.

      UPC/KPN? KPN are the Dutch incumbent telco. They don’t sell cable, do they? The cable network in the Netherlands is a joint venture between Liberty and Vodafone and the highest upload it offers is 50.

      For VM to offer more over 3.0 they’d have to spend a load of cash on the network, alongside swapping out people’s splitters and isolators. So other than those minor technical reasons, sure, they could sell 100.

    11. Avatar photo Randy says:

      @anonymous and i’m not convinced you’re not a VM employee.

      UPC does offer over 50mbit. And no not by fibre, by coax. They offer it in NL (Utrecht and Wageningen and Amsterdam) and in Poland too. So stop with your UPC is “only 50mbit upload”. Even someone else below says Romanian UPC are offering 200 upload.

      So, I’m not convinced you’re being honest and not a VMO2 employee trying to “set the record straight” by lying about it.

      DOCSIS 3.0 can do 120Mbit with 4 channels bonded. 4. And your argument about one user soaking up all the upload BW by themselves is idiotic. Do you think they offer a “real” 500mbit to each 500mbit customer? I can 100% guarantee you if they did, they wouldn’t be able to support very many 500mbit customers.

      Go read the spec. It’s capable of a lot more than VM offer. and now they’re on DOCSIS3.1 for many people they can support many customers with more than 50mbit upload speed. We should have an option of faster upload. It is possible. Don’t try to fool us and pretend it isn’t because it’s right there in the spec for anyone to read.

    12. Avatar photo anonymous says:

      Oki doke, Randy.- I’m not a VM employee or affiliated with them in any way incidentally.

      The ‘Giganet’ product is 1000/50 in the Netherlands. Might be trials of higher but that’s the product. Source: Ziggo NL.

      ‘Even someone else below says Romanian UPC are offering 200 upload.’

      Nope, appears they never offered above 25. Source: UPC RO.

      ‘DOCSIS 3.0 can do 120Mbit with 4 channels bonded. 4.’

      No, that’s the gross MAC-layer throughput. 5.12 Msym/s * 6 bits per symbol = 30.72 Mbit/s/channel which is not all usable for carrying customer data. After overheads you end up with somewhere between 100 and 108, which you never want to saturate as most implementations use ATDMA so as utilisation approaches 100% latency and jitter shoot up. VM over-provision by 10% on upstream to ensure customers receive Ofcom-approved throughput. Can we see a problem with a single customer having 110 burst on a network that can’t provide 110?

      ‘And your argument about one user soaking up all the upload BW by themselves is idiotic. Do you think they offer a “real” 500mbit to each 500mbit customer?’

      No, but neither do they sell 500 Mbit over a shared 500 Mbit of capacity. They sell it over more like 1.6+ Gbit/s. For Gig1 they add another gigabit or so via a 3.1 channel.

      The standard capacity planning on access networks is to take average sustained peak usage and ensure there’s enough capacity free for a user on your highest tier to max out as a burst. You’d also know that upload is far easier to saturate 24×7 than download. To download you have to actually be downloading things and we can all only consume so much, to upload you can run a file server and have other people do it for you.

      I would suggest a read of https://support.aa.net.uk/Congestion_and_Contention and specifically the bit on contention where it discusses statistical contention in a very approachable way and why selling 100 on 100 is a really bad idea.

      ‘Go read the spec. It’s capable of a lot more than VM offer.’

      Indeed it is, but given you said: ‘However, there is ZERO technical reason why VMO2 could not offer much higher upload like in the regions of 100mbit upload speed and no before someone says it , you can do this with DOCSIS 3.0’ what the spec says is irrelevant. These are maximums and to reach them requires investment in new hardware as the kit to do so didn’t exist not that long ago.

      Of course, if you regard needing to rip out and replace tens of thousands of amplifiers, millions of in-home forward path attenuators, replacing diplex filters, upgrading optical nodes, thousands of node splits, replacing hundreds of thousands of passive components in the network, etc, etc, as ‘zero technical reason’ you’re spot on.

      If that all didn’t make perfect sense to you you’ve no business stating that VM have ‘ZERO technical reason’ to not offer something. It clearly doesn’t else you wouldn’t have made the original claim and referred to the specs. You think this can be done with the flick of a switch and are completely wrong.

      ‘We should have an option of faster upload. It is possible. Don’t try to fool us and pretend it isn’t because it’s right there in the spec for anyone to read.’

      It is possible, which is why it’s been tested and will hopefully be released. 100 is probably doable once some upgrades to various components have been done. You did know that the upstream line cards, VM use CCAP so different line cards for upstream and downstream, that are in a bunch of the CMTS aren’t 3.1 compatible so need replacing, yes?

      I’m sure you did given your self-assurance on this subject.

      May I recommend reading the specifications in full, which you can find on Cable Labs, rather than some headline numbers from a random website or Wikipedia article? If you were to do this you’d be more aware of the technical challenges and in turn why claiming that because the specification says it x cable company can flick a switch to provide it is ridiculous.

    13. Avatar photo Randy says:

      Giant waffle. Wall of text.

      Result. You’re still lying. Just because you say .. nope they don’t offer this or that. There are people right now on the aforementioned networks enjoying more than 100mbit up. But you think they don’t exist. Ok. I give up. Perhaps someone who lives there will set you straight one day.

      Simple fact, DOCSIS3.0 can do over 100mbit up. Not in theory, not with this or that, not with VM having to spend tons of money on this and that. Today, they can give you 100mbit but they don’t. And we have DOCSIS3.1 now and you still think 50mbit is a reasonable upload? Of course you do, VM employees usually love their network.

      Same argument about 500mbit down. You say ah no but they give people it from a pool of 1.6gbit .. uh huh .. and how many people can they support doing 500mbit from that pool of 1.6gbit eh ? So you’ve pointed out your own mistake from before then.

      There are DOCSIS 3.0 networks doing 100mbit upload right now. You think it’s theory. You’re a shill. No more replies people can either look it up , or be fooled by giant walls of text that mean absolutely nothing in an attempt to hope people will not care or not understand and somehow believe that the networks giving 100mbit upload today are make-believe because someone calling themselves “anonymous” says so.

      Replace splitters, amplifiers etc etc .. WHY ? I’m sorry does coaxial cable suddenly change when it goes from DOCSIS3.0 to 3.1 ? Funny, I didn’t see VM come rip up all the cables when they did here, nor did I see them rip up the Fibre to coax node and splitters that are within line of sight of my front window.

      Absolutely full of it. You think a wall of text which is mostly wrong will convince people. Total shill.

    14. Avatar photo Randy says:

      Oh and hello CarlT

    15. Avatar photo anonymous says:

      Hi Randy / Randee – https://randeedawn.com/appearances/

      ‘Replace splitters, amplifiers etc etc .. WHY ? I’m sorry does coaxial cable suddenly change when it goes from DOCSIS3.0 to 3.1 ? Funny, I didn’t see VM come rip up all the cables when they did here, nor did I see them rip up the Fibre to coax node and splitters that are within line of sight of my front window.’

      You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about and when called on it get aggressive and insulting. The provider I know selling 100 Mbit/s over DoCSIS 3.0 replaced every amplifier and optical node in their network to make it happen.

      https://broadbandlibrary.com/understanding-band-splits-in-two-way-networks/ should help explain why.

      They went for a low-split – figure 3 in the link above – to a mid-split – figure 5. This required replacement of all their low-split equipment with mid-split.

      VM have been replacing 50/85 split equipment where needed with mid-split equipment. Their 65/85 kit is okay for now.

      That’s the constraint to offering much higher upload speeds. There’s not enough usable RF capacity to carry the signals without upgrade and 8 channels is necessary to safely carry the needed capacity unless the network is very lightly used.

      Sadly you didn’t seem to bother to read the A&A link I provided that would’ve explained the statistical contention and capacity planning way better than I did. Would’ve shown you I didn’t contradict myself at all – 4 customers in a group maxing out simultaneously is far less likely than 1 customer maxing out. Not a difficult thing to understand.

      What your comments have shown beyond any doubt is that you have no idea what you’re talking about and seem to have an anger management issue. You’ve read the headline 3.0 spec, assumed that all networks are created equally and VM are refusing to offer higher speeds for the lols.

      With that I’ll leave this be. Any reasonably minded person can read for themselves. Disinformation debunked, sources provided for those that aren’t arrogant enough to assume they know everything and have the curiosity and intellect to follow them and learn from them.

    16. Avatar photo anonymous says:

      Forgot something: whomever that is clearly isn’t Randee Dawn. I should’ve put that part in quotes.

      I most definitely do not work for Virgin Media O2 or indeed any company in Liberty Global. If I were so apparently proud of the VM network it wouldn’t really make much sense for me to be pointing out that the same network is why VM can’t offer higher upload speeds over 3.0.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial is a really high level overview for the interested. A key section for these purposes is ‘The forward-path and the return-path are carried over the same coaxial cable in both directions between the optical node and the home.

      To prevent interference of signals, the frequency band is divided into two sections.’

      This division isn’t something that can be changed by flicking a switch, actual hardware must be changed whether modules or entire units.

  8. Avatar photo nick says:

    Never believe the nonsense that Virgin Media uploads to the press

    The press never ever check out th veracity of these claims

  9. Avatar photo Zakir Hussain says:

    Still no sign of Openreach Fibre, Virgin Media 02, Community fibre, G network and Hyperoptic at my building where I live in East London under Clarion Housing.

    Good news for most people

  10. Avatar photo Bob says:

    They say 1 Gbit, but I say still only about 12-13 Mbit for protocol 41 with SH3.

    1. Avatar photo anonymous says:

      Just as well you need an SH4 for it, then.

  11. Avatar photo Oache says:

    UPC Romania (Vodafone Ro now) aka Virgin Media before being bought by Vodafone they offered 500 down/200 up (maximum speeds) on Docsis 3.0 and we talking about a few years now , unfortunately after the Vodafone takeover they ofer 1GB down/25 up.
    In the future expect Vodafone takeover and lower uploads speeds

    1. Avatar photo anonymous says:

      According to the Way Back Machine’s snapshots of their website UPC Romania have never offered above 25 Mbit upstream.

      They were selling 500/25 since at least 2015 and have never sold higher to residential customers.

      To have sold 200 would have required them to have rebuilt their network mid-split. They have not.

  12. Avatar photo Gary says:

    What percentage of the UK now has access to gigabit broadband after this announcement then?

    1. Mark-Jackson Mark Jackson says:

      We’ll have to wait for TBB to run the numbers on that, but I’d guess around 62-64%. Key uncertainty is always the weighting for FTTP overbuild in urban areas.

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