Virginmedia building works in South Reading, Berkshire. New cabinets ?.

[paul_taylor]

Hi all,

So in my area in South Reading Berkshire, RG2. Virginmedia are doing works in all the local roads installing new small Cabinets next to the existing VM cabinets.

Does anyone know what this is for ?. New services to be released ?. Very interested as possibly thinking of leaving as FTTP was installed in our road recently and 1GB available for quite cheap, so we are no longer tied to VM infrastructure.

Thanks.

[Roger_Gooner]

The legacy HFC network is being overbuilt with fibre, and the new cabinets are for this fibre. VM will be migating people onto this network which uses XGS-PON technology, but the starting date has been delayed. Any hub will be replaced with the hub 5X (a combined ont/router) and STBs will be replaced with Stream boxes (as it's IPTV).

[Cardiffman282]

As a side note I understand that the delay is more about upgrading the VM billing system to cope with the network upgrade. Looking at Glassdoor (well worth a look to get an insider's view of the weird world of VM) a new billing system has indeed finally been brought in but there is still a lot of work to be done on it yet.