Forum Discussion

yuujh's avatar
yuujh
Joining in
22 days ago

Why no other ISPs use VM cabling?

I am conscious of switching to Sky or BT as they of course use open reach older copper connectivity via master socket to houses. As much as I want to leave VM I am aware only they use the fibre optic cables which seem to me more modern and provide better speeds. Why do no other providers use the fibre optic cables or do they? Cheers

  • nodrogd's avatar
    nodrogd
    Very Insightful Person

    VM have their own regional headends & telephone exchange infrastructure, which was built totally separate to BT Openreach. Only 1% of VMs local delivery network is fibre to home. The rest is copper coax. DOCSIS internet uses a wideband radio frequency system. Fibre is converted to coax by nodes every 1km or so, driving up to 20 slave coax cabinets. This system is called HFC (Hybrid Fibre Coaxial). Because of the wideband nature of DOCSIS cable Broadband, it can deliver up to 10Gb download speeds without recourse to fibre technology. This is the short answer to why the infrastructure is not shared. VM are moving to XGS-PON full fibre over the next few years, & they are already looking at partners to share this new infrastructure when it goes live.

  • The downside of DOCSIS is the latency. Mine is an average of 13ms, on fibre its about 1 to 2ms

  • Roger_Gooner's avatar
    Roger_Gooner
    Alessandro Volta

    VM plans split off its entire networks (all three of them) into a company called NetCo, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Virgin Media O2 - although there are reports that at least 20% is due to be sold off to raise a minimum of £1bn. As a network operator NetCo will seek to get ISP partners on board in a similar way to Openreach.

  • jpeg1's avatar
    jpeg1
    Alessandro Volta

    I am conscious of switching to Sky or BT as they of course use open reach older copper connectivity via master socket to houses.

    Not correct.  Older Openreach connections do still use copper pairs, but they are very busy around the country upgrading connections to fibre to the premises (FTTP) which is a more modern and technically superior technology to most of the existing Virginmedia connections. 

    You can check with your postcode on the Openreach website to see when Openreach will be upgrading your area.