Broadband ISP Connexin, which recently began work on their £80m project to build a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to unseat KCOM’s “broadband monopoly” in Hull and East Yorkshire (here and here), has today launched a new 2000Mbps (2Gbps) trial package for local homes.
The operator has recently been busy deploying their new fibre optic network around the Kingswood area of North Hull, with Kestevan Way and Wawne Road also seeing activity. The first homes began to go live on this network in January, although at the time the fastest package available was a 1000Mbps (gigabit) service for just £49.99 per month on an 18-month term.
However, Connexin has decided that it needs to go further in order to differentiate their offering from the local competition, which in practical terms means they’re now claiming to offer “Hull’s fastest residential speeds” via a new 2Gbps (symmetric) speed product trial (only one home is named as testing this).
The new package is at least twice as fast as the best competing residential products from rival operators, such as KCOM, MS3 (here), Grain (here) and, possibly, Quickline too in the near future (here). But the package itself does not yet show on Connexin’s website and the ISP has not provided us with any information on price (we’ve asked and will update once the answer arrives).
Katie Muir, Connexin’s Fibre Product Lead, said:
“Connexin Fibre is about bringing broadband choice to Hull and taking the customer experience to the next level. In testing, we have already delivered speeds in excess of 7000 Mbps and we are excited to launch our 2000 Mbps package shortly to up the game and challenge the monopoly in Hull. We want to show the people of Hull a great customer experience from their broadband supplier.”
Announcements like this one tend to be more about marketing and bragging rights, particularly when the package itself is not yet generally available. Nevertheless, some consumers will always be tempted by bigger numbers and this kind of competition will eventually prompt a response from rivals, which do have the capability to adapt.
We should point out that Connexin are by no means the first UK provider to do a package faster than around 1Gbps. For example, Zzoomm offer 2Gbps, CommunityFibre can go to 3Gbps and B4RN will give you 10Gbps – within their respective network patches. But such packages will often be quite pricey, for obvious reasons.
The biggest catch with such these speeds is that the vast majority of people wouldn’t be able to take full advantage of it today due to a variety of reasons, such as slow WiFi, misc. hardware limits and the various bottlenecks of remote internet services (Why Buying Gigabit Broadband Doesn’t Always Deliver 1Gbps). This will change over time, as it always does.
absolutely pointless having those sort of speeds
For you, yes! Not for everyone.
I agree we should all go back to dial up!
Yes, past a certain point the benefits of more speed diminish. But there are still benefits and with every day that passess those benefits grow.
Pointless for those who are ignorant of what one can do with such speeds.
At these speeds, the PC is the bottleneck! Especially older ones.
I must admit I find it hard to understand why any domestic user (or small business for that matter) would require such an option in the real world …
Futureproofing!
It’s hard to understand for you because you are probably not a professional business user. There are a number of scenarios where upload speed is important.
Not every internet user is a passive down-streaming netflix consumer.
No-one requires it but for some it’s a nice to have.
What car do you drive Ray? Can it go faster than 70Mph? Do you drive it faster than 70Mph? Shouldn’t it be limited to 70Mph? After all, no one needs to be able to drive faster than 70Mph??
Define require, if you mean maxing the connection speed all the time fine. If you mean not being the bottleneck then the faster the better.
Usually your connection is the bottleneck but with a fast enough connection it moves most of the bottlenck to the wider internet. Even if your not maxing your connection all the time your still benefitting from not being the bottleneck. Stuff will happen quicker more often giving you more free time.
The dictionary defines it – ‘to need something or make something necessary’. Unless you’re handling LHC data at home 2G is a bonus but not required.
My point, that’s gone over your head, is that it’s not black and white.
The only time 2G could be described as a requirement is if downloading under time pressure that may not be deferred from a source that can actually deliver it.
Virgin Media call the highest tier the ‘vanity tier’, not the ‘required tier’ for a reason.
Absurd to describe it as a requirement, though, without being pedantic in the extreme. If you’re running an application that actually requires 1-2 Gbps and will fail, rather than just take longer if you don’t have it you’re running something that’s probably breaching the terms of your connection.
You’re preaching bandwidth to a guy who had 3 connections totalling 2.5G/290 Mb until recently and will probably take symmetrical 10 next month.
Requirement? Of course not.
It’s a shame that people often project their inabilities on to others.
While you may not know what to do with it, more enterprising minds do or will find one.
Or it could just be that I use the Internet for work and leisure and am content. I don’t feel the need to use capacity just because I pay for access to it. I have no interest in the relatively few applications that could soak up all the bandwidth as I consider them a waste of resources or am actively opposed to them.
A real shame is when some anonymous random feels the need to try and score points with pithy comments.
Sadly that can’t be fixed with a broadband upgrade.
Just an example: you share a large house of gamers and all want to download the same games/update at the same time. As well as streaming games to YouTube in 4k or uploading large videos off-site
Or even the possibility of working directly with video files on a remote storage server.
Working directly with remote videos would be an interesting choice if the bitrate is high enough to merit multiple gigabits per second, and causes issues with latency / BDP. Need specialised hardware and software to move video streams at those rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncompressed_video#Data_rates
Downloading from something like Steam, which consumes as much bandwidth as it can possible get, while doing other tasks is risky. Need strong QoS to ensure that the packets never sit in queues on the upload side, and hope that your service provider has some QoS downstream.
I’ve downloaded from Steam at 2.3 Gbit/s, no doubt it could go higher. It’d get the downloads done more quickly but >1G wouldn’t be required for those applications with appropriate QoS.
A reminder a gigabit split 4 ways gives you 225 Mbit/s – 38 MB/s give or take. 30 seconds for a gigabit. 5 minutes for 10. 50 minutes for 100.
Is Connexin using KCOMs network? The IP on the speedtest bellongs to KCOM GROUP LIMITED.
They also removed the + sign in the image after the 3 on the ping in the speedtest and the speedtest ID bellongs to a test from 2011 https://www.speedtest.net/result/1285889774
Strange.
Yep, looks like terrible Photoshop.
Test IDs don’t match, results doctored.
It does look suspicious. I have no doubt their network could deliver that speed, but the picture they’ve presented has some.. unusual elements.
They probs removed IP for the picture so customer didn’t get doxxed or gdpr or something
It’s all marketing and bragging rights these days. These speeds they technically should be able to do with the equipment they say they are using but just wanted a pretty picture…
I want 24Mbps downstream and upstream for £10 a month
I’m on Virgin 1 gig but can’t actually access all 1100mbps because the router only has ports capped at 940mbps…I realise the idea is it gives capacity for multiple users but surely it wouldn’t have cost much to put 2.5G on at least one port.
The Virgin Media HUB4 is a disgrace for the 1gbps service. You would think they would target these customers for the HUB5 upgrade first before people on low tiers.
I don’t care if there is an issue with digital phone or VM wifi pods. I don’t use the latter and couldn’t care less about the landline as that’s just bundled into my pricing plan. Spell it out on an upgrade page and make the customer tick the box for agreeing that these services won’t work until they fix the code. I have a 2.5gbps on my router that would work with the HUB5 and multi-GB AX Wifi.
Yup, I wanted 1G but they said it would be the Hub 4, although my friend only has M350 and got offered the Hub 5 for free