Cityfibre and UK ISP Vodafone Trial 2Gbps Home Broadband Speeds
Cityfibre has today issued an update on their project to upgrade their entire UK G-PON based Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to harness 10Gbps capable XGS-PON technology (here), which reveals that they’ve successfully completed a trial of 2Gbps home broadband speeds in York with ISP partner Vodafone.
At present the network operator aims to cover up to 8 million premises (funded by c.£2.4bn in equity and c.£4.9bn debt) – across around 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here). So far, they’ve has already covered 2 million UK premises, including 1.8m Ready For Service (RFS) via ISPs (here).
However, the operator’s current network is still based off Calix’s G-PON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) technology and this places some constraints on how much capacity can actually be delivered to each end user (i.e. GPON shares capacity of 2.48Gbps downstream and 1.24Gbps upstream between 8 to 32 users). The solution they announced last year was to upgrade this to XGS-PON technology from Nokia and Calix (here).
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As part of that, Cityfibre has already deployed the technology across their network pilot in the City of York, and they’ve now gone one step further by completing a residential focused selected customer trial of 2Gbps (symmetric) broadband speeds with ISP launch partner Vodafone. In theory, the XGS-PON kit could eventually push speeds up to 10Gbps, but for now there’s no urgent need for such performance.
The new services were delivered using the Vodafone Pro II Broadband package and the new Vodafone Ultra Hub router and Super WiFi6E Booster (mesh WiFi) bundle (here), which was only launched in October 2022. No details on the price of this package have been revealed.
Michael Greening, Product Director at CityFibre, said:
“After a successful trial, we’re a major step closer to bringing multi-gig full fibre services to millions of homes and business across the country. But at 2Gbps, we’re barely scratching the surface of our network’s capabilities. Thanks to our XGS-PON upgrade programme, we’ll be able to offer symmetrical speeds of up to 10Gbps in the future, further evidence that not all full fibre networks are created equal.”
Max Taylor, Chief Commercial Officer Vodafone UK, said:
“We’re the biggest Full Fibre broadband provider in the UK and recording our fastest ever home WiFi speed showcases the true capability of the technology and our Pro II Broadband. With the UK’s fastest router, we’re all set to handle the next exciting developments, so our customers always get the fastest broadband speeds possible, in all corners of their home at a great price.”
The XGS-PON upgrade, which enables CityFibre to continually upgrade its network while also supporting more customers on each Optical Line Terminal (OLT) port, should improve their network performance and service offering, while also cutting their costs, improving efficiency and lowering power consumption.
The new technology is currently still “due to be rolled out as standard across its network” from April 2023 and clearly Vodafone will be one of the first ISPs to harness it. We should point out that Vodafone is not the first UK ISP to offer speeds of 2Gbps or faster to home users. B4RN, CommunityFibre, Zzoomm and others are already doing this.
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In addition, Openreach are also testing a new 1.8Gbps tier and Virgin Media has conducted trials of 2.2Gbps speeds – both will soon become real products.
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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Be still my beating heart!!
I’m trying to read tea leaves based on CF’s earlier releases, they will be doing XSGPON “from” April, and I assume it will coexist with GPON. Are we expecting them to have XSGPON everywhere from april, in new areas only, or backfill over time?
I’ll be on this day 1 😀
My guess is from April (assuming things go to plan), new installs will use XGS-PON. They’ll upgrade existing areas over time, but that’ll take years.
However, this suggests they might start offering packages up to 2 Gbps, sooner rather than later. In which case they’ll probably also upgrade on demand.
This announcement doesn’t really suggest anything.
The messaging is clear that from April they will deploy XGSPON equipment as “standard” i.e. any new deployments. There’s no published plans for upgrades of existing infrastructure or wide spread selling of 2Gbps.
I’m curious how quickly they’ll roll out faster packages, when they start the XGS-PON upgrade in April.
The previous press releases made it sound like the XGS-PON upgrade is driven by efficiency, as opposed to higher speeds. But clearly higher speeds don’t hurt either.
The big question is, will competition make 2 Gbps be the new 900 Mbps, in terms of pricing? Or will 2 Gbps be extra premium?
If it pushes the pricing of 2.5Gbps interfaces and the equipment that uses it down then I am all for it.
Any idea when TalkTalk will get this as they are also a partner of CityFibre?
If the kit is installed at the CF exchanges then the ISP would be able to consume this.
Caveat is on costing and them having CPE capable of utilising the speeds.
I can’t fathom why they installed GPON in the first place. Nor openreach for that matter. I’m sure they have their reasons (probably cost) but lots of altnets deployed XGS-PON from the get-go, so why install it?
Still it’s nice to see advances and this is great for Cityfibre/VF but well I’ve seen several 2+ gbit trials and few places that actually sold it afterwards.
In respect of CF I believe its mostly down to cost as XGS-GPON only really became a commercialy viable product in the last few years, and there wasn’t much equipment about during that time. So a product came to market with little support and they were already rolling out their network in some areas. That said they’ve realised the value of it now and will be rolling out alongside their existing setup (as per article or another XGS-GPON and GPON can run side by side).
Openrech OTOH…..well they’re looking at it but don’t expect symmetrical ul/dl speeds as they want to protect their Ethernet and Leased Line businesses….despite them being completely different products.
Woop! – They will be coming here September – We be nice to have CF as a backup line whatever the speed
Can someone explain to me how the average home user needs 2Gbps, or even 1Gbps? And the ones requesting symmetrical connections, are they all running server farms in their front rooms?
Just my opinion, but some common sense is required to separate the marketing nonsense from the real reasoning behind moves to XGS-PON. The most probable reason Cityfibre are moving to XGS-PON, is due to the amount of customers they can host off a single OLT. Of course CityFibre, Openreach, or whoever, will sell customers whatever speed they request, that’s available on the network, and no doubt some customers will rip themselves off by purchasing speeds way in excess of their personal requirements.
Don’t buy it!
Obviously you are not a gamer
Cityfibre having large amounts of customer usage data likely don’t need to rely on opinion and can see that an increasing number customers could use a higher bandwidth.
They won’t be average customer though and yes, a large number does help with marketing.
A gamer, living alone, wouldn’t need a download speed over 20Mbps, upload 5Mbps; Downloading patches and updates, etc, will take longer, but actual gaming experience would be more dependent on latency and connection reliability. It’s unlikely that even reasonably heavy usage households, would notice any day to day performance difference between 100Mbs and 1Gbs connectivity. Just to add, “BigJonny” our household will probably settle for sub 100Mbps, when we eventually move to FTTP, I wont pay for something I wouldn’t notice or need.
Here we go! I was going to comment “Waiting for the “we don’t need gigabit” guy” but you beat me to it. If you don’t want the speeds, don’t buy it. It’s incredibly dense to think we should stop progression.
If you want to sit an wait an hour for a download to complete, that’s cool. But I have better things to be doing rather than waiting around. I want my downloads completed in seconds.
You need hundreds of megabits if you are a gamer. Games can be over 120gb in size so gamers willingly pay for faster. You must have plenty of free time if you only need 20mbits.
Attaboy “Telecom”, Attaboy.
Problem: “wHo nEEEEdS mORe ThAn 100MbS! I SiMpLy cANt FAthoM It.
Solution: Stop complaining about technological progression or the price of x product and buy the product that suits you.
So you’ll be downloading Call of Duty Modern Warfare every day? Also, having a 1 Gbps link doesn’t guarantee you’d be able to download all 200Gb in under 5 minutes, much will depend on the host server capacity and bottlenecks in the core networks. It wouldn’t bother me downloading over a couple of hours, while I’m out for a walk or at the gym, or doing other things.
“Stop complaining about technological progression or the price of x product and buy the product that suits you.”
I’m not complaining, I’m just saying I’m probably better at managing my time, and finances, than impatient downloaders who sit in front of their monitors watching numbers increment. I will buy a product that suits me.
Keywords
‘I will buy a product that suits me’
So whats wrong with gamers wanting 1gbps to save time? At 20mbits it would take up to 10 hours to download a game. You are arguing with everyone here for the sake of arguing. Get over it. Some people want 1gbit or faster.
symmetrical is useful for creators who upload to services like YouTube or those that upload to the cloud. A friend is a graphics designer and when she was doing large projects and lived in this city she was always complaining about upload speed to send the project to her clients.
I do agree with you about 2Gb/s, I will be surprised if many home users will ever need it, but then I doubt many need 1Gb/s either.
Businseses maybe.
@Sam P, to a certain extent you are correct, don’t need it, don’t buy it, but people are being forced onto FTTp when they don’t need it or will be soon, so what do those of us that have no need for extra speed do then?
Ad47uk
WOW something i agree with you on lol! I am a qualified photographer (but not as a business) and i can take 2GB of photos a time. On the old 5mb upload FTTC it took ages to upload to the cloud. Now on BT900 it takes a matter of minutes. I would never go back.
“At 20mbits it would take up to 10 hours to download a game. You are arguing with everyone here for the sake of arguing. Get over it. Some people want 1gbit or faster.”
By my reckoning it would take 10,000 seconds, or 166.666 minutes, or 2 hours 47 minutes at 20Mbps. No wonder you think you need a Gigabit connection, if you think it will take 10 hours, in reality it would take less than 3 hours.
“I am a qualified photographer (but not as a business) and i can take 2GB of photos a time. On the old 5mb upload FTTC it took ages to upload to the cloud.”
2Gb photograph would take around 7 minutes to upload at 5Mbps, it could hardly be described as an age
“By my reckoning it would take 10,000 seconds, or 166.666 minutes, or 2 hours 47 minutes at 20Mbps.”
I forgot to mention, that’s for Call of Duty Modern Warfare coming in at around a 200Gb download.
Ex Telecom Engineer….I thought you’d know the difference between Bits (which internet connections are sold in and Bytes which files are stored in. Which makes me wonder if you have ANY knowledge of how data transfers ACTUALLY operate.
Ok as an IT Tech let me enlighten you, a Byte is made up of 8 Bits (short for Binary Digit aka 1 or a 0), 1024 bytes in a kilobyte, 1024 Kilobytes in a megabyte and 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte. Now we know that, lets do some maths to get the ACTUAL time it would take to download 200 Gigabytes over a 20 megabit per second connection.
200 Gigabyte file size is 200 x 1024 = 204800 Megabytes
20 mbps or megabit per second download speed / 8 = 2.5 megabytes per second
204800 / 2.5 = 81920 seconds / 60 = 1365 1/3 minutes / 60 = 22.75 HOURS
F- Suggest check your maths and facts before spouting nonsense in future….
@K, 2GB on 5Mb/s would not take that long to be honest and 2GB is a lot of photos, saying that you would be using Raw format and i have no idea what camera you have.
I want to start doing videos again when I get more sorted out here, but I am in no rush to upload them once I start doing it. i casn just let the computer do it as I am doing other things. My friend on the other hand had to get the data to her clients pretty quickly, she has moved now out of this god awful city and now have better broadband where she is. but she has also given up doing large jobs and gone for smaller local stuff so no need for the extra upload speed. 🙂
I don’t play many games, but I had to download a game from Steam yesterday as it corrupted on my computer somehow, it took a long time, but then I went for a walk and did some shiopping while it was doing the job, not a problem.
A late mate used to do music and the computer he produced it on a P4 used to take ages to mix, some people said why doesn’t he update it as it would be quicker, but as he said while it is mixing it gives him a chance to go and have a coffee or go for a walk and get some air out of the studio.
Some people are in too much of a rush, reminds me of London, where everyone is rushing around and have no time to look around them.
Bro, you definitely don’t go to the gym and I’d be shocked if you even had a job lol
Ex telecom engineer…. ha
“Ex Telecom Engineer….I thought you’d know the difference between Bits (which internet connections are sold in and Bytes which files are stored in. Which makes me wonder if you have ANY knowledge of how data transfers ACTUALLY operate.”
I’ll give you that, I worked in transmission so I only ever think in bits per second terms anyway, but it doesn’t change the fact that 99% of households don’t need 1Gbps connectivity. A 200GByte file would download in under 5 hours at 100Mbps, so no big deal with some patience, and at even slower speeds people could just download a game overnight anyway. We’re on an FTTC connection and have no problems, at around 36Mbps download, 6Mbps upload and I believe we’re a typical household.
If I was a gamer, or wanted to upload large files occasionally, I’d just do those occasional downloads/uploads overnight, and save a lot of money paying for bandwidth I don’t really need most of the time. As people point out, it’s up to themselves if they want to pay for something they’ll only fully utilise 5%, 10%, or less of the time, and I’ll pay for something that’s adequate 100% of the time.
“Bro, you definitely don’t go to the gym and I’d be shocked if you even had a job lol
Ex telecom engineer…. ha”
I actually do go to the Gym Bro, and since I’m now retired I only need an off peak membership, meaning I go during the day when it’s quieter, more chilled, and cheaper. Why would I pay for full membership at the gym, when off peak is adequate? Just like I wouldn’t pay for 1Gps since I wouldn’t need it.
Sam P ha
“I don’t need 1Gbps therefore nobody needs 1Gbps” – Ex Telecom Engineer
“I don’t need 1Gbps therefore nobody needs 1Gbps”
Your words, not mine Mike
If you’re going to put something in quotes, make sure the quote is factual, in this particular case you just made it up.
@mike, people say that about me when say I have no need for FTTP, and I am fine with my 36Mb/s, I don’t want or need FTTp, so no one else should.
Completely wrong, as I have no problem with other people having FTTP or faster speeds. My problem is when the time comes that providers start pushing more for us to move to FTTP. Once the area I live goes fully FTTP, then it will become more difficult to stay on FTTC.
If i move, I want it to be when I want to, not when others want me to
I don’t understand why cars exist, a motorbike should be enough for anyone.
They are small and fit in more places and are way more economical to run. Why do you need an estate car? Are you running a haulage company?
Yes ok parents might need to transport children but they can just put them in the topbox or do multiple trips. Yes it might take a bit longer but the actual driving experience is more than enough.
@Ad47uk
” If i move, I want it to be when I want to, not when others want me to”
This would be true if you had bought and installed your own FTTC network, but if you’re just buying a ’20Mb broadband service’, then the operator you buy it from can provide it over whatever technology they want. They’re not going to keep FTTC alive just because some ludite in a dressing gown and slippers ‘prefers the flavour of data when it’s delivered only 99% over fibre, with just the last little bit being over copper. I don’t want it delivered over fibre completely. it would ruin the charachter’.
@Flame Henry, Luddite er and in a dressing gown and slippers. Almost every room in my house has an Alexa unit in it, I have Philips hue for my lights, Switch bot to turn my coffee machine on, I even use my phone to pay for stuff contact less now and again and my watch, but I do prefer to use cash I must admit. I have a Roku TV that is used for mainly streaming, most of my music listening is online as I use Amazon Music for it, I read ebooks. Does that sound like a Luddite? As for dressing gown and slippers, yes I have them, nice to relax in them later on in the evening after coming home from work.
As for FTTP I realise at some point we will get to the stag where there are more people using it than FTTC, but i think that will be a while here, I can’t see Openreach getting their 75% around here that they need to strop the sale of FTTC this year, unless they move like holy hell. There is a very large estate on the other side of the river where Fibre have not even been started, it is a massive estate.
I will change at some point on my own accord, I expect depending on if I stay living here, but I am in no rush. I am waiting until after March before I think about recontracting due to the prices going up in March and if I decide to stay with Plusnet I will stay on FTTC, but I may wait until June which is when my contract does run out and change to Now broadband if they keep the same prices, they don’t do FTTP.
So I am in no rush whatsoever and as i said will change when I want to change as at the moment I am not in a stop sell area for FTTC,
there’s always at least one whinger every time internet speeds increase. what a boring life you must lead to tell others what they want or need based on your own needs.
“what a boring life you must lead to tell others what they want or need based on your own needs.”
Boredom’s a state of mind, not a lifestyle choice. I probably do have a boring life compared to a soldier in Bakhmut, as do you or anyone else posting on here.
You miss the point of my original post, the point being that the vast majority of home users don’t need anywhere near 1Gbps broadband, in fact if everyone bought 1Gbps and utilised the full bandwidth continually, the servers, core routers, backbone network, etc, wouldn’t be able to cope and everyone’s downloads would be throttled to death before it even reached the access network.
My gripe is with the narrative aimed at encouraging everyone to subscribe to ever faster local access bandwidth’s, when the providers know most householders will only use a fraction of the Gbps bandwidths 99% of the time. My guess, for what it’s worth, is that higher speed offerings will get ever more expensive over time, relative to lower speed offerings, at which point most people may decide the lower speed offerings will serve their day to day needs with little noticeable difference.
@Rich, my Dad used to have a motorbike and side-car, I don’t remember it, but my brothers do, and he put my brothers in the sidecar when they were children and my Mum was on the back of the bike. Lots of people don’t have cars, I don’t drive. But I do realise that cars can be useful.
OK let’s look at this a different way taking your car analogy into consideration, A car with a bigger engine and more power will get you to where you want to go faster in theory, that is until you meet traffic, also getting there faster with a larger engine cost you more in fuel.
The same with Full fibre, you may get what you need faster, but it costs more and there is no guarantee you are going to get everything faster due to congestion or the server you are connected to not being very fast.
Proved that a few times at the other half place, download some files, and they took ages as the server she was connected to was very slow and she has a Gigabit connection. Sure, it doesn’t happen all the time, but it does.
I have to admit yesterday I kind of wish i have a faster connection, trying to download some game files, and they took a long time, so I decided to watch something on Disney+ while it was doing, only to find it buffered and would not play. But I could have lowered the bandwidth the computer was taking, but i could not be bothered, so I read instead.
But this only happens once in a blue moon for me as I don’t normally download games, and the only reason I downloaded it was because I uninstalled it from my computer as I was having a problem with it freezing.
So while it would have been nice to have a bit faster broadband, I am not rushing to get FTTP.
One aspect being ignored by the stubborn “You don’t really need faster” crew is that a fast connection allows you to do more than one thing at a time (or is so fast it negates the need to entirely). Waiting for a large game update to download or files to upload might not be an issue to you, but do you still want to be able to use your connection for other things while you wait? I had a 36Mbbs connection until Hyperoptic installed in my building, and one large download or upload would render the connection useless for anything except basic use. Streaming quality would drop, browsing becomes sluggish and online gaming pings would suffer.
These days if I need to back up my entire PC or music collection I can do it in minutes. If a large game update comes out just before I’m settling down in the evening for a couple of hours of gaming with a friend I don’t have to worry about it. And even while those tasks are going, I can still stream in 4K or do anything else without it being affected. This is the way it should be, I shouldn’t need to schedule my life around the constraints of technology.
I’m not maxing out my connection most of the time (and many servers can’t anyway) and I’d probably be just as well served with HO’s 500Mbps package, but 1Gbps was an option so I took it. It was barely more expensive than BT’s far slower, less stable service.
“2Gb photograph would take around 7 minutes to upload at 5Mbps”
I think the OP meant 2GB of photographs (capital B, for bytes), hence it would be this:
2 GBytes = 2000 MBytes = 16000 Mbits
Hence it would take around 53 minutes to upload.
In general, the asymmetric FTTC with its 20Mbps upload limit makes this VDSL pretty useless for many office or business users, you can’t even do a simple cloud backup with this.
@Chris W, I think I have already said that I had to download a game to reinstall and found I could not stream while doing so, but for me this is a once in a blue moon thing, I just left the computer on at night to download it instead or read a book.
but I agree for people who download or upload for that matter a lot of large files then yes faster broadband is good, not sure if they really need 2Gb/s to do that or 1Gb/s to be honest,
I back up my PC to my NAS, I don’t use cloud storage, any important files I back up onto a couple of USB sticks, and they put one outside the house, which at the moment is the locker at work, the other I carry with me in my wallet.
People use their broadband in different ways I agree, but to make use of even a 1GB/s to it full, you really need to have a large family that is downloading and streaming all at the same time. My sister-law/brother have got 400Mb/s BT FTTP and i think that is an other kill for them, but they are paying only slightly more than what they would with BT lower speed, I think at the end of the 24 month contract they may reduce the speed a bit.
Talking about contracts, this is one of the main problems for me, 24 month contracts, I am not fond of 18 months contracts, but will put up with them, but I am not signing up for a 24 month contract, simple as that
@Ad47uk I also own a motorbike 🙂
But there is a difference between saying “I don’t need a faster car” and “faster cars shouldn’t exist nobody needs them”.
Even the green argument doesn’t really apply to fibre. I’m relatively confident an XSGPON network will use less power than an FTTC network.
I will be on the multigig product as soon as they release it.
IDK about server farms being located in front room’s, who on earth would do that!
I’m more of a backroom kind of guy.. Atleast its where i currently have majority of my kit located, next we have all the remote stuff too..
1Gbps is fast but then again, as i said on TBB in the past who on earth could ever need 1Gbps let alone symmetrical connections.. Now i see why, yes i do make use of it im not maxing out my connection 24/7 anymore coming from a VDSL2 Connection which gives plenty of headroom and now capacity to manuvure at will. If speeds are there you will find a way to use it, especially if you’re into this kind of stuff..
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” – famous words from Bill Gates (that he refused he had said…)
Anyway the world moves on, if you ever listen to young generation in their teen years today, every other one wants to be a youtuber and publishes video clips to various social portals. They don’t care/know about compression, data saving etc – whatever 8K/4K their pocket device can produce (e.g. look at insane resolutions of Samsung S22). Petabytes of garbage data.
Then there’s remote working and virtual meetings, video conferences in high quality – all happening simultaneously requiring fat network pipes with minimal latency.
Network gaming at mass scale, eSports – has been mentioned already
Cloud evolution, all media today tend to be uploaded/backed up straight to cloud storage, times of having local big drives can be a thing of a past very soon.
And finally mass streaming of films, smart homes with CCTV and hundreds of IoT devices, P2P network… just finish this all off with lack of patience (“I want it now!” mentality) and you will soon realise gigabit network is not a luxury but a must.
Does anyone know what the splitter ratio is on CF’s network? I’m curious about how many users will be supported on a 10Gbs downstream channel.
Checking one ISPs website called Giganet, they state that they have a 8:1 or 5:1 split on Cityfibre’s network, 32:1 on Openreach,, now im unsure if this is on the consumer level or a business level. webpage shows the following:
Giganet’s GPON-based services
Many of Giganet’s full-fibre broadband services are powered over a GPON-based network.
Please use our availability checker to see whether you can receive a full-fibre service.
Here are some example Giganet full-fibre services that use GPON technology:
Local UltraBEAM
Available across Giganet’s unbundled exchange areas from Basingstoke, Salisbury & Winchester.
Using the Openreach network.
Selection of PIR (burstable bandwidth)
Selection of CIR (guaranteed bandwidth)
Maximum of 32:1 GPON split.
UltraBEAM
Available across Giganet’s unbundled exchange areas from Basingstoke, Salisbury & Winchester.
Using the Openreach network.
Selection of PIR (burstable bandwidth)
Selection of CIR (guaranteed bandwidth)
Maximum of 32:1 GPON split.
CityFibre UltraBEAM 500 & 1000
Available across CityFibre’s network area.
Using CityFibre’s own fibre network.
500Mb/s & 1Gb/s PIR (depending on UltraBEAM 500 & 1000 respectively).
300Mb/s down & 156Mb/s up CIR.
Maximum of 8:1 GPON split.
CityFibre ELITE 200-1000 Flex
Available across CityFibre’s network area.
Using CityFibre’s own fibre network.
1Gb/s PIR.
200Mb/s guaranteed symmetric CIR.
Maximum of 5:1 GPON split.
Source:https://www.giganet.uk/2019/07/08/what-is-gpon/#:~:text=8%3A1%20and%2032%3A1,runs%20to%20the%20carrier%27s%20network.
@reece – thanks for that. Looks like the splitter ratio is pretty conservative for the ELITE 200-1000 product. The 5:1 split would guarantee their committed 200Mbs rate. But if they are using a higher splitter ratio how does that play with XGS-PON? To offer a CIR of 2Gbs they would have to stick with the same 5:1 ratio split wouldn’t they, or I suppose put no more than 5 users on an upstream fibre. I guess with new deployment its pretty simple to stick at 5:1 but to overlay the 2Gbs service onto existing fibre might be a bit more challenging? Perhaps two offerings, one based on higher splitter ratios but with max (not committed) 2Gbs whilst a business/expensive option of 2Gbs committed based on 5:1? It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
@Barry – For residential maximum is 1:32. There are other ratios for business services.
https://cdn.cityfibre.com/Partner-page/Downloads/CF-FTTH-Local.pdf
@Ex Telecom Engineer
You might think this is genuinely overdoing with 1Gbit or even higher speed, yet I am on 1Gbit and living alone and I truly get to use it.
I upload large files to the FTP server and also download Memory dumps and VMs, which are very large in size and at times I get 85-105 Mbit/sec.
It has truly transformed my life in terms of speed of access as well as price, I pay £35/Month for my 1Gig FTTP connection which is truly amazing. Another benefit is that when I have visitors, my work does not get impacted by any streaming or access to different websites. Let’s not forget that many ppl have Nest or Ring and multiple cameras connected 24/7.
Truly there are many use cases where 1Gbit does bring benefit.
You’re a pretty rare case I think – 99.99% certainly don’t need gigabit, there’s almost nobody with a reasonable use case. Including me.
….. but did I get it the instant it was available despite it being grossly overpriced and a total waste of money? Hell yes. Almost 3 years now, don’t think I’d want to go back.
My exchange was on the list published on this site in March 2021, yet the CityFibre checker says they have no plans for my area yet. I don’t expect to ever get it.
I get it, it’s a commercial thing, keep small incremental upgrades wasting the service users cash when they should’ve gone with the higher tech available already, not to be developed in the next decade… and also seem to be doing something instead of going with a higher tech solution then just focus on installing to more people and focusing on quality of services and reducing costs… it’s the shareholder pushing the agenda and then burning it into the ground until the costs are so high and packages, that people can’t afford it anymore, and then it all comes down crashing and some other big isp buys it for cheap. A vicious circle.