Virgin Media tests 8Gbps broadband

Found article on BBC. Virgin Media tests 8Gbps broadband

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47130989

8Gb... hmm, i wonder how there testing this speed with?

Hi

The advantages in the report of high speed with regard to downloading films needs a reality filter, as the vast majority of people their films are streamed and not downloaded, so you don't need anywhere near these sorts of speeds for films, it looks good in the report, but has no practical advantage.

It is also using some new version of EPON. FTTP by OR uses GPON, which also has new versions that can support those sorts of speeds.

The caveat though, is this bandwidth isn't point-to-point but shared, GPON supports splitting a single fibre to up to 128 subscribers, EPON extends this up to 32,768! That 8Gbps isn't destined for each user, but shared with the whole street. As Virgin in the report states, they are to trial this with 50 users, which then equates to a more sedate 160Mbps per user.

It's a headline, but the practicality is Virgin wants to run the least amount of fibre to cover the most amount of subscribers, which is typically how they are known to run their network now, always pushed to the limit

Regards

Phil

Edited by deleted (Wed 06-Feb-19 08:39:08)

In reply to a post by max360:

8Gb... hmm, i wonder how there testing this speed with?

A PC with a 10G NIC. I've had iperf3 run at ~9Gbps under Linux. A 10G-capable router is not a common or cheap item though.

The article says it's PON, with symmetric 10G upload/download. If so, that means they're using something funky like XG-PON2 or XGS-PON.

Anyway, it's just headline-grabbing. Sure, they can make the technology work - but the commercials are a different matter.

The press release

Some more detail including what kit they are using.

Edited by deleted (Wed 06-Feb-19 08:44:00)

In reply to a post by PhilipD:

GPON supports splitting a single fibre to up to 128 subscribers

I thought it was 32 subscribers per single fibre over GPON, can someone confirm for sure either way please?

GPON supports splits of up to 128, so a provider looking to have less backhaul will squeeze more people into a split, i.e. higher local contention.

In other words not all GPON is created equal

Thanks for the quick reply, does that mean companies like Openreach vary its number of splits or do they have a standard number they stick too for their GPON.

Openreach stick to 32 in their deployment.

In reply to a post by max360:

Found article on BBC. Virgin Media tests 8Gbps broadband

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47130989

8Gb... hmm, i wonder how there testing this speed with?

SamKnows testing. This is nothing more interesting than UNCAPPED EPON. Nice PR but not much else.

EPON runs on different wavelengths from their RFoG they supply normal services over so they just install kit at the home that passes the EPON wavelengths through and feed that to EPON termination kit.

This isn't ground breaking, the kit and standards are mature, but it made the BBC so mission accomplished.