Virgin Media's answer to CityFibre?

[tepark]

Hi All,

I have been a Long Time Virgin Media customer mainly because they have been the only company to offer me higher than 5mb broadband service. Now that CityFibre is available in our area I was curious to understand what Virgin Media are going to do to make them selves more competitive with the new providers. 

Firstly I am interested to know if Virgin Media are going to increase their "consumer" upload speeds. Provides using CityFibre's network get uploads speeds that are considerably higher than those on Virgin Media. For example I am currently on a 600mb download speed with Virgin Media with an upload speed of 40mb max. I can't find on Virgin Media's web site the price for broadband only for this package so pricing is a bit of a pain to check. However for a package that includes 500MB down and up 500MB upload with a minimum of 250mb up/down guaranteed are Virgin Media considering or going to increase the Upload Speeds.

Now the reason I bring this up is that more and more people are working from home, and if you work in a IT Support Role sometimes you need to handle "large" (3gb or greater for example here) log files on the 40mb at best upload speed for Virgin Media it take a while. On these new services using the City Fibre Network this would be much better.

I know the paragraph above is a "smaller" subset or users however this could apply in other area's, such as content creators, Accounts or people that work on larger files. It would also help improve VPN Speeds for Business Users that have a requirement to work on documents that remain on their corporate network.

I am aware that there has been some "issues" on CityFibres' side however, it seams a bit of a shame that Virgin Media can't just increase the Upload Speed (network infrastructure dependent) and retain some of their customers. 

Yes the TV is good however more and more people are moving to streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu etc. 

What is everyone else's thoughts on this? 
Virgin Media - do you have plan to address this (that is not moving to a Business Broadband Solution)?

[unisoft]

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@Roger_Gooner wrote:

I've been a cable broadband customer for a long time and there has been a number of cost-free speed increases at unpredictable intervals. We're now expecting all the Gig1 customers to get 100Mbps upload at no cost, in which case there will be headroom, in a manner of speaking, for those on M500 to get an upload increase to (probably) 50Mbps.

As for TV: yes, there is more streaming than before and VM is well aware of it, which is why there are more apps (Disney+ has arrived and Paramount+ is coming).

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It should have been 100/110 to start with as it falls below their own 10:1 ratio!

Even Openreach based FTTP are far higher than 52/55mbps!

To say VM giving a free upgrade after a 13.8% increase this year and increases previous years for something that should have been there to start with is unbelievable.

[legacy1]

Well...if everyone on VM upgraded to 1Gb not care about everyone tearing up the upstream then we might get this XGS-PON (or what ever) sooner.

[chrcoluk]

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@carl_pearce wrote:

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@tepark wrote:

What is interesting is that within the same postcode you can get VM's Business Solutions that use a similar hub (including network) and give much better upload speeds but consumers seam to be left behind... 

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@Andrew-G wrote:

  If you want faster upload, go with CityFibre.  If you want VM's bundles, TV offering, regular massive price rises, and top notch customer service then stick with VM.

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Yes the massive price increases are forcing my hand, and the "customer Services" well... far from "top notch".

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From what I can see on VM's site all business connections conform to the 10:1 ratio.

Since the introduction of the DOCSIS 3.1 upstream channel it appears that VM had/have plans to roll out 100Mbps upload for Gig1 residential users, so you never know, they may roll out 10:1 for other subscriptions.

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I think the lower tiers already had their upload speed boost recently, its also more difficult to prevent congestion when raising those because the bulk of customers are on the lower tiers.

My congestion only recently got relieved when they added the 3.1 channel, before then on gig1, I couldnt get 50mbit in the evenings.  So I expect my node will be borderline of managing peak upload speeds when the 100mbit gets unlocked even with the lower tiers at their current levels.

[IPFreely]

Definitely won't be released everywhere at once. A number of areas will be held back due to capacity concerns. Given your network was recently upgraded to accommodate the 3.1 channel you might well have an 85 MHz return. Wonder if they'll use that at some point?

[chrcoluk]

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@IPFreely wrote:

Definitely won't be released everywhere at once. A number of areas will be held back due to capacity concerns. Given your network was recently upgraded to accommodate the 3.1 channel you might well have an 85 MHz return. Wonder if they'll use that at some point?

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Thanks, hopefully they will.

[Roger_Gooner]

I'm on M500 which has upload speed of 36Mbps. Just checked upstream Max Traffic Rate, it's 55000085 and Ookla's speedtests are showing up to 52Mbps. I have five upstream channels and am running an old hub 3.

[IPFreely]

Yes. The 5 3.0 + 1 3.1 channels give enough capacity to provide 10:1 across the board again: which they are. Your 5 channels are good for 125 Mbit/s or so, keeping a single customer under the 50% of the capacity and Gig1 customers obviously have the OFDMA 3.1 channel on top to draw from. They actually draw from it first before they dip into the 3.0 capacity.

[Roger_Gooner]

I think I'm right in saying that if there were a problem such as congestion in my area VM could swap my hub 3 for a hub 4 or a hub 5 so that I could be put onto a D3.1 channel.

[IPFreely]

I would be more concerned by the bursts of packet loss that have been showing in your BQM for the past days, now lower level but way longer lasting, than potential capacity issues. 

[legacy1]

A flow diagram for BQM would be like

packet loss
yes
is latency good?
No
is your connection idle
yes
capacity issues

packet loss
yes
is latency good?
yes
is your connection idle
yes
likely docsis line problem