How do Virgin Media deliver broadband now?

[ch37]

Our village was built in the early 2000s and there was a bit of thing at the time about Virgin not having access to lay cable, therefore we (and everyone else) has been limited to whatever they can squeeze out of the standard 'Fibre to the cabinet' set up. We're topping out at 60Mb and all the providers (Sky, BT, PlusNet) suggest the same kind of speed.

We had a Virgin Media letter introducing their services today, I usually ignore them as when you go to check, they don't actually provide to us. However, our postcode is eligible and have quoted speeds up to 213Mb, how is that possible?

When Virgin laid cable to our old house that was a year after they had spent months physically going up and down every pavement in the town I lived in at the time, digging a channel in all the pavements to lay new cables. They then rocked up and laid a further cable across our garden to make the connection. No such work has happened around here, all the pavements are still smooth and untouched! We're also in a cul-de-sac set back from any pavements with about a hundred yards of tiled driveway.

Do they deliver it differently now? If so, how, without any infrastructure work, are they managing to get 213Mb to our house when all the other providers are topping out at 60Mb?

[Mr Pointy]

They can't, it's still over their own coax infrastructure. Check what you can get with Samknows:
https://availability.samknows.com/broadband/broadb...

[steveatesh]

Mr Pointy said:

They can't, it's still over their own coax infrastructure. Check what you can get with Samknows:
https://availability.samknows.com/broadband/broadb...

But double check as SamKnows gave me the wrong answer. For about 30 seconds I was excited that we could finally get even the most basic of fibre, but turns out we can't still.......

[ch37]

Mr Pointy said:

They can't, it's still over their own coax infrastructure. Check what you can get with Samknows:
https://availability.samknows.com/broadband/broadb...

Cable not in our area according to that.

Somebody down the road spoke to Virgin after the letter today and they were told the cable is already there (unused for 20 years?!) and engineers are doing non-invasive work to prepare it now.

[Tomo1971]

Virgin are now allowed to use BT's infrastructure.... No, I don't mean use their copper to the house as Sky etc do, but use their ducts and blow their own fibre through them

We have just had this done, as has about 700 houses in 5 schemes were part of. Obviously they blow the fiber around the estate and then if you sign up, they may need to dig a little depending on where the duct from the nearest bt chamber ends on your property.... Ours was about a foot away from the front door, so they just needed to lift a flag and dig 6 inches and route it.

We've gone from 70mb at the hub from sky to 540mb on Virgin... Its defined as Fibre to the premises. Only the last 3m from the wall box to the Virgin superhub is coax.

There are two new street cabinets near the BT cabs and they have trenched between them - I assume that main incomer from virgin is either from an adjacent street that already has virgin or via the main BT trunk.

[clived]

Tomo1971 said:

We've gone from 70mb at the hub from sky to 540mb on Virgin... Its defined as Fibre to the premises. Only the last 3m from the wall box to the Virgin superhub is coax.

We have Virgn FTTC and we're approx 150' from the cabinet, so all that last bit is coax. We also have over 500Mb - it's interesting that Virgin can't (or I guess actually choose not to?) offer better performance from FTTP than FTTC.

[Ultuous]

ch37 said:

Somebody down the road spoke to Virgin after the letter today and they were told the cable is already there (unused for 20 years?!) and engineers are doing non-invasive work to prepare it now.

I was given a similar run-around (slightly different scenario - had moved house and could have kept by 'Openreach' contract, but Virgin assured me they could give me superfast and save me some money)....

Went through weeks of being told the cable was there, only for the guy who turned up to install to not being able to locate it... 12 or so months later they were finally 'sure' it was ready and couldn't understand (after I'd previously been left without internet for 3 months and out of pocket having to cancel then reinstate my previous provider) why I wasn't prepared to go with them after all that!

Unless you have a large house-hold consuming large amounts of video/ peer-to-peer etc. at the same time, 60mb isn't usually much of a constraint anyway - the 'throttle's' typically at the other end of the connection!

[Chris Type R]

Ultuous said:

Unless you have a large house-hold consuming large amounts of video/ peer-to-peer etc. at the same time, 60mb isn't usually much of a constraint anyway - the 'throttle's' typically at the other end of the connection!

I've found that we're not too compromised as a household using 36Mbps FTTC versus Virgin 350Mbps at home. The former had to be installed as a backup as VM had let me done a couple of times when trying to deploy software updates remotely.