Any experience of Virgin's new XGS-PON (full fibre) network?

[nanda015]

Hi there, as the title suggests. Virgin Media are rolling out to my area and they're installing their XGS-PON full fibre network and that will be available in the next few weeks.

I understand should see some benefits like lower latency than the DOCSIS network, but wondered if anybody had any real world experience of their new network at all and advise if its as good as it looks?

Thanks!

[nodrogd]

There are only a handful of areas currently installing this. Currently you are still getting the same Broadband speeds as those on the DOCSIS network (ie. Upload is only 10% of the Download speed signed up for). There are no TV services (apart from Stream boxes) in the XGS-PON areas.

There are a few posters here on the new network, so I will leave them to respond further.

[NigelGoodwin]

Have you been told it will be available in just a few weeks?. They fitted fibres on the poles round here back in June, and still no sign of any action happening.

[Tomtom2004]

This was installed for me Yestetday.  I'm far from impressed with support or service.  I'm in Ireland and  in the hub 5x there is no option to put it into  modem mode .so if you have invested in  a mesh  its now redundant.   Also there is no port fowarding option which I need for work.   I was told by one support agent they would enabled it within the hour but th as t didn't happen. When I rang back I got a different agent who told me  they would not enable it for me. I also got 2 tv points  neither of which are working despite being online for over 24 hours now . Installer told me they would work in an. Hour

Thsts my experience to date I've Benn with vm for years never had an issue until now. Luckily I have a 14 day cooling off period which it looks like  I will be utilising and sky have been door to door this week offering an alternative service.  

Apologies for the long post but I'm pretty disappointed with my experience so far

[Adduxi]

VM Ireland is slightly different to VM UK, in that I believe you get IPv6 and CGNAT IPv4.   From memory, I think you can request to get IPv4 only, and this should enable you to do port forwarding etc.  I'm not sure, however if this still applies to XSG-PON fibre setups and the new Hub 5X?

[Tomtom2004]

Thanks for reply . I believe you are right . One ageny I spoke to said they sent the request for ip4 and it should be active within the hour.   The second one said they  are not switching to ip4 any more.  Its annoying as I was all ready a vm customer and had ip4 enabled on my hub 3 to allow me work from h ok me. I wouldn't have switched if I'd known port forwarding or modem mode wasn't an option..

I think no modem mode will a major issue for anyone wanting to implement their own hardware to I.prove coverage etc.  Its not on really. 

[kevuwk]

Had it installed just over a month. As somebody else has said you will get the Hub 5X which currently has no modem mode if you wish to use your own router. Other than that I haven't really noticed any issues with it, the full bandwidth has been there when I wanted it and the latency has been consistently low. I have a monitor on the connection which shows 11-12ms to one of the google DNS servers pretty much constantly.

[NigelGoodwin]

While there isn't a 'modem only option', you can simply set your mesh network to Access Point Mode, where it works fine (as I've done with mine) - more annoying was no ability to alter the default IP address (I wanted to change it to 192.168.1.1). There's also a port forwarding mode, which seems fairly comprehensive.

[Tudor]

"more annoying was no ability to alter the default IP address"
all VM hubs are now locked down and you cannot change the default LAN sub-net.

[Tomtom2004]

I don't have a port fowarding option in my hub 5x  only port filtering. Are you sure you have port forwarding in yours?