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Coax is fibre. VDSL is fibre.

I'm so tired of this. Those of us who know even just a little bit about broadband know that a twisted pair cable with a VDSL modem isn't fibre. We also know that coaxial cable running DOCSIS is not fibre. Yet i've just had a lovely conversation with Virgin Media online chat.

So they advertise their "Vivid 350" as "optical fibre". So I asked, hoping it was true if they would install a fibre optic cable directly to my house... not a copper coaxial cable ... and they said YES!!! they said they would install fibre optics....


Are these people deliberately misleading us? Did the guy know nothing? Did he think he could just say to a network engineer that coaxial cable is fibre ???!

This has to stop. Can I sell you my VW and call it a ferrari ?
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I wasn't intentionally trolling the guy, I honestly thought they had brought out an actual fibre based product... so I asked... and I was lied to.
 
A few points from this come to mind as we've seen it before.

1. If they do install the hybrid fibre coax service (i.e. coax from the fibre node to your home and then also inside your home) then they might have just given you a get-out-of-contract-free-card, so I'd hold on to that as evidence in case you don't like the service and need to challenge them over miss-selling via ADR.

2. It's possible that you may live in one of Virgin Media's FTTP areas (they're deploying to about 2 million premises with this), so the optical fibre would indeed reach your home and in that case they would NOT be misleading you.

3. The cabling inside your home is not particularly relevant here, as responsibility for the network side usually ends at the first primary network termination point inside your property. So if they take fibre to that and only go coax for internal cabling then it's still technically FTTP. But the lines do become a bit grey here.
 
Hi Mark... I was hoiping it was option 2 and that they were doing FTTP in my area. This is why it makes me a bit angry when the sales person has been so brainwashed by their own spin that even they can't tell the difference... and why I specifically asked if it would be an optical fibre cable not a coaxial cable.. and was told yes it's actual fibre ... then later in the conversation that it's coax at my house ... meaning it's the plain old HFC stuff we've had for years and not their new FTTP product .. but since they don't seem to know the difference themselves it's worrying to say the least.

If it were option 2 ... i'd have taken it up on the spot (i've already spoken with VM business about managed access and i'd have no install cost as apparently the distribution point is at the end of my driveway!!!... but when he said they would use a super hub 3.0 I cottoned on to the fact that I was right and it's HFC and ended the convo.

Would just like an actual fibre connection. Seems impossible. and given we are due to get gfast someday (im in trial area) i think it means that other delivery methods like fibre will be delayed longer than non-gfast areas. maybe.

The absolute state of the UK though. Where we can sell coax as fibre, and call VDSL fibre and get away with it... and we are behind even Romania..
 
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Virgin Media's FTTP deployment is a bit unusual in that they use Radio Frequency over Glass (RFoG).

I've not seen one of these installations done first-hand inside a home myself as there are none nearby, but my understanding is that at a certain point (usually the outside wall of your house) they'd need to run that optical fibre into a receiver (splitter), which would then output the connection down a normal coax cable for your home. Virgin can then continue using their existing CPE hardware and coax connectivity.

I think the splitter they use is one of these or an older model:

https://vectortechnologies.com/product/boostral-611/

As such the use of their normal coax based hardware inside your home doesn't mean it's not FTTP.
 
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