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Virgin XGS pon performance

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What is the latency like on XGSPON vm? Does it seem as good as Openreach’s FTTP?
I get around 4ms to 1.1.1.1 and 10ms to 8.8.8.8
 
I've just done a traceroute from my HFC broadband and I also go straight to the Wolverhampton Core, there is no mention of the Telford PoP in my traceroute, but i know there used to be, they must have changed the routing at some point i assume.

View attachment 16451
You connect to Telford CMTS 14 and went through it on your way to Wolverhampton: your cable modem terminates on it. There was at least one and highly likely at least two switches involved too.
 
Yeah I have seen those, which maybe explains the Virgin presence at the Ironbridge exchange.

I guess they don’t need a presence in the big Telford exchanges as all areas are in close proximity to the main POP / UBR.

It’s good to see Virgin have invested in the network here, they were awful in a lot of areas a few years back. Lots of high packet loss complaints in Wolverhampton too around that time. I always steered clear.

To bring Shrewsbury on board which is fed from Telford they had no choice I guess.
I noticed the same, I have been with VM three times now.

First time at an older address back when they were NTL, and the congestion was extremely bad.

Second time at this address when they first activated broadband in the area, and was also quite visible congestion, although not as bad as the previous address, if I remember right i left for VDSL. But before I left there was an improvement when they did a node split for the 10:1 upgrades back in the days of the 30/3 tier around the time they released the first super hub.

Then many years later in October 2022 I moved back to VM on their gig1 package and wow, it was transformed, not a single time I noticed any obvious congestion on the downstream, and once they rolled out docsis 3.1 on the upstream there was no visible contention there either. TBB graph was nothing like I had previously experienced as well, using SSH command line wasnt far off a DSL experience.

Shame their contracts situation is still a mess, but network wise it does appear they have done some work in recent years. I also remember they had peering issues in the past with LINX getting maxed out, no such problems 3rd time round either (owned by liberty global).
 
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Yeah Comex do all the fiber blowing, splicing and ducting work for Virgin in the Midlands. Very few of Virgin's own staff can blow fiber.

I had a nightmare with my install. They came to install and the cabinet was dead. Turns out the fiber was broken feeding it. So Comex came out and blew a new one. To be fair to Comex, they worked until 10pm to get the cab back up. I was the first customer on the cab so nobody else reported it. I then had to wait for Comex to tell Virgin the cabinet was ready for service. Took 3 weeks in total.

I dealt with the VM web forum and they were really helpful.
Yeah exactly, with VM it is speaking to the right people, I also find the community or twitter/x team really helpful.

If only they could have the same level of support via phone.
 
You connect to Telford CMTS 14 and went through it on your way to Wolverhampton: your cable modem terminates on it. There was at least one and highly likely at least two switches involved too.
That is VERY specific information :) ... thanks!

On a geeky level, is it still located at central park at the Cable Midlands/Telewest old head end, or did they vacate that building?
 
That is VERY specific information :) ... thanks!

On a geeky level, is it still located at central park at the Cable Midlands/Telewest old head end, or did they vacate that building?
Still there but no branding to the building.

I believe it’s a non TV headend though. No dishes etc.
 
Indeedy: TV is sent to the hub sites via fibre now. The two super headends at Langley and Knowsley are where most of the magic happens.
 
Still there but no branding to the building.

I believe it’s a non TV headend though. No dishes etc.
Yep just looked on Google maps, it still has the old Satellite dishes from the time Cable Midlands was a thing! LOL... It before they linked Telford and Newport to the main Cable Midlands/Telewest network and so we couldn't get "The Box" and some other cable exclusive channels which played out from Cable Plaza in brierley hill. I had this idea they'd of relocated by now, but nope, still there 👀
 
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Yep just looked on Google maps, it still has the old Satellite dishes from the time Cable Midlands was a thing! LOL... It before they linked Telford and Newport to the main Cable Midlands/Telewest network and so we couldn't get "The Box" and some other cable exclusive channels which played out from Cable Plaza in brierley hill. I had this idea they'd of relocated by now, but nope, still there 👀
That’s mad I couldn’t find them so thought they had been taken down. I wasn’t looking hard enough! They're ancient!

I remember the dish farm at Cable Plaza well. They have gone now as I believe it was all relocated to Wolverhampton when Virgin closed the call centre down there.
 
That’s mad I couldn’t find them so thought they had been taken down. I wasn’t looking hard enough! They're ancient!

I remember the dish farm at Cable Plaza well. They have gone now as I believe it was all relocated to Wolverhampton when Virgin closed the call centre down there.
So i wonder if the new Nexfibre infrastructure is still going through the normal Telford or any other local PoP, or does it have a more direct route?
 
I noticed the same, I have been with VM three times now.

First time at an older address back when they were NTL, and the congestion was extremely bad.

Second time at this address when they first activated broadband in the area, and was also quite visible congestion, although not as bad as the previous address, if I remember right i left for VDSL. But before I left there was an improvement when they did a node split for the 10:1 upgrades back in the days of the 30/3 tier around the time they released the first super hub.

Then many years later in October 2022 I moved back to VM on their gig1 package and wow, it was transformed, not a single time I noticed any obvious congestion on the downstream, and once they rolled out docsis 3.1 on the upstream there was no visible contention there either. TBB graph was nothing like I had previously experienced as well, using SSH command line wasnt far off a DSL experience.

Shame their contracts situation is still a mess, but network wise it does appear they have done some work in recent years. I also remember they had peering issues in the past with LINX getting maxed out, no such problems 3rd time round either (owned by liberty global).
It was definitely pre covid but area 04 which is Wolverhampton, Dudley, Telford had a really bad time with congestion. The VM message board was full of complaints. A friend of mine moved into a new build in Telford and the only decent speed service he could get before BT rolled out FTTP was Virgin.

Speeds used to dive to below 1Mbps at night and the pings were sky high.

I remember when Telewest / VM used to announce speed upgrades etc, Telford would always be last because the network was creaking.

It wasn't long ago local Facebook groups etc would be full of complaints about Virgin being down again or the service being slow.

It's good to see they have turned it around. I have friends on HFC who agree it has massively improved.

In my case, I was sceptical about Jitter being a gamer. My friends said you are mad for not going with Openreach FTTP but everything has been very stable.

Obviously the load on Virgin isn't particularly high here. I think there are under 10 homes out of 60 using Virgin here. Everyone else is on Openreach FTTP.
 
So i wonder if the new Nexfibre infrastructure is still going through the normal Telford or any other local PoP, or does it have a more direct route?
I would expect them to go to the nearest VM pop and then onto VM's core network.

Not sure if Shifnal is routed to Telford or goes direct to Wolverhampton.

I believe back in the old Telewest days Telford was linked to Brierley Hill directly so no Wolverhampton core back then.

The reason the latency drops on XGS is simply the removal of DOCSIS and no issues with noise, poor quality degrading coax etc. DOCSIS 3.0 adds around 4-6ms in latency.

If you think the traditional VM cabinet in your street is fed actually by coax from the big nodal cabinet, on XGS, the SD1i is fed directly with fiber. 10gb fiber.

When they completed my install they checked the power levels on my 360 box and Superhub 5. I said are the power levels not immaculate on RFoG and the response was they can still be too high.
 
It was definitely pre covid but area 04 which is Wolverhampton, Dudley, Telford had a really bad time with congestion. The VM message board was full of complaints. A friend of mine moved into a new build in Telford and the only decent speed service he could get before BT rolled out FTTP was Virgin.

Speeds used to dive to below 1Mbps at night and the pings were sky high.

I remember when Telewest / VM used to announce speed upgrades etc, Telford would always be last because the network was creaking.

It wasn't long ago local Facebook groups etc would be full of complaints about Virgin being down again or the service being slow.

It's good to see they have turned it around. I have friends on HFC who agree it has massively improved.

In my case, I was sceptical about Jitter being a gamer. My friends said you are mad for not going with Openreach FTTP but everything has been very stable.

Obviously the load on Virgin isn't particularly high here. I think there are under 10 homes out of 60 using Virgin here. Everyone else is on Openreach FTTP.
Things have a come a long way from when I would regularly see on ntl's status page "XXXXX rebalancing" 2-3 times a week. :)
 
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Telewest pushed the network really hard. VM had to spend a fair amount of money on node splits then spectrum upgrades.

The rebalancing was largely due to a software quirk on the uBRs, due to this modems tended to end up on the first available upstream. The rebalancing was a script that sent modems upstream channel change messages.
 
Telewest pushed the network really hard. VM had to spend a fair amount of money on node splits then spectrum upgrades.

The rebalancing was largely due to a software quirk on the uBRs, due to this modems tended to end up on the first available upstream. The rebalancing was a script that sent modems upstream channel change messages.
Do you know if XGS is routed the same way as RFoG? As in physically. I mean in HFC areas or existing cable franchise areas.

Is it street cab, to local node, to UBR/local POP and then onto the Virgin core?

I am guessing in new build areas where there is no UBR/ existing VM network they'll have a large node connected straight onto VM's core?

I am intrigued as to what Virgin would need to change to upgrade my RFoG street to XGS.
 
It was definitely pre covid but area 04 which is Wolverhampton, Dudley, Telford had a really bad time with congestion. The VM message board was full of complaints. A friend of mine moved into a new build in Telford and the only decent speed service he could get before BT rolled out FTTP was Virgin.

Speeds used to dive to below 1Mbps at night and the pings were sky high.

I remember when Telewest / VM used to announce speed upgrades etc, Telford would always be last because the network was creaking.

It wasn't long ago local Facebook groups etc would be full of complaints about Virgin being down again or the service being slow.

It's good to see they have turned it around. I have friends on HFC who agree it has massively improved.

In my case, I was sceptical about Jitter being a gamer. My friends said you are mad for not going with Openreach FTTP but everything has been very stable.

Obviously the load on Virgin isn't particularly high here. I think there are under 10 homes out of 60 using Virgin here. Everyone else is on Openreach FTTP.
Yeah I used to live in a new build in Lawley and Virgin Media in 2013/4 was the only available decent internet.

I think i had their 100mbps service, during the day it was fine, at night it would always dip below 10mbps, they did sort it in the end, but took years not months.

But there was a lot of customer perception damage done in the area because of the issue.

I've moved since then, where I live now I've never really had any issues, but since the move to DOCSIS 3.1 and moving to a SuperHub 5, the reliability of my broadband has improved significantly.

They need to rollout the SH5 a lot quicker, I have friends who still have issues with the SH3, which I know would be resolved by an upgrade to the SH5. But they keep been told that if they don't have the 1gbps service, they can't have a SH5... even though I was given a SH5 (through retentions) on the 250mbps service.
 
Yeah I used to live in a new build in Lawley and Virgin Media in 2013/4 was the only available decent internet.

I think i had their 100mbps service, during the day it was fine, at night it would always dip below 10mbps, they did sort it in the end, but took years not months.

But there was a lot of customer perception damage done in the area because of the issue.

I've moved since then, where I live now I've never really had any issues, but since the move to DOCSIS 3.1 and moving to a SuperHub 5, the reliability of my broadband has improved significantly.

They need to rollout the SH5 a lot quicker, I have friends who still have issues with the SH3, which I know would be resolved by an upgrade to the SH5. But they keep been told that if they don't have the 1gbps service, they can't have a SH5... even though I was given a SH5 (through retentions) on the 250mbps service.
I think they actually built more node cabinets in Lawley to improve capacity and it took forever!

Seems a stable bit of kit the SH5, mine has been in modem mode since Day1 but the pings and jitter are stable.

It did go through a stage of rebooting every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night at 2-2:30am. That seems to have stopped now though.

The VM guy that came out said he tries at all costs to not give the 4’s out now if he can.

Unless you’re on XGS or Gig1 they won’t give you a 5/5X unless you really stamp your feet.
 
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