CityFibre & ISP

So this morning I notice on the Cityfibre website I am now offered an ISP as in the fibre has gone live in my area, I am based in Knaresborough and Cityfibre have spent £46 million building this Gigabit network for Harrogate/Knaresborough and outlying areas which is great.

What's not so great is the launch partner being talktalk is only offering 500mbit and 75mbit upload, now forgive me if I am wrong but this isn't gigabit and gig up and gig down.

I hope other ISP's will be offering packages on this but its not really a great advert for a £46 million build project to offer full gigabit fibre when the speeds are no where near that.

I dunno if this is the same in the other areas Cityfibre have enabled and that if I wait a few weeks more ISP's will appear or is it talktalk have an exclusive for a period of time.

Any info gratefully received

Talktalk only offer symmetrical on CityFibre.

550/75 is their OpenReach FTTP offering.

It doesnt say that anywhere though and talktalk dont appear to know what products they offer all seems a little half ar*ed to be honest.

With Talktalk you have to know what the products are called:

"Fibre" is copper (FTTC)
"Ultrafast fibre" is also copper (G.Fast)
"Future fibre" is FTTP

But I don't think they distinguish at the product name whether it's delivered via Openreach or Cityfibre; what you get is at their option.

I've seen it reported that the service is symmetric on Cityfibre, but can't see it mentioned on their website.

Hi there yes Its future fibre as they call it, have seen posts some say symmetric some say not, just seems weird to launch a gigabit network with an ISP that cant deliver a gigabit.

Do you really need gigabit though? I'd take a 500/500 service over a 900/110 any day.

Does anyone need a gigabit, the answers going to be a no to that I agree, but if you can have it you want it.

Technically CF allow symmetrical up to a Gbit so why not Gbit, I had virgin gig before I moved, but no virgin here but a new gigabit network launches but only offers 500mbit just doesn't make any sense.

I guess the worry is I grab this at 500mbit then 2 weeks later XYZ network launches on the same infrastructure offering a GIG and I am tied into a 18 month contract. This bit I don't know how CF work, does the launch partner get exclusivity for a while or is it pile em on (ISP's) every week for a bit.

Here's hoping

Kind Regards
K

Edited by K3V1N_R (Fri 24-Sep-21 13:11:06)

I just did a quick check on TT site:

Address which only has CityFibre FTTH - Future Fibre 506/75 average speeds quoted
Address which only has Openreach FTTP - Future Fibre 506/75 average speeds quoted

So it looks like one of two things going on here; either as TT don't differentiate between the different providers on their Future Fibre products they've set the average upload to align with the Openreach values to meet the Ofcom average speed reporting requirements or TT do throttle the upload.

I suspect the former as I doubt TT would go to the expense and hassle of installing equipment to throttle CityFibre, they only sell symmetric so the limit would be on the TT side.

Has anyone got TT on CityFibre or does Andrew have any speed test data to show which is the case?

In reply to a post by Ad_G:

I suspect the former as I doubt TT would go to the expense and hassle of installing equipment to throttle CityFibre, they only sell symmetric so the limit would be on the TT side.

No equipment would be required. It would be whatever line profiles TT has asked Cityfibre to configure.

In reply to a post by Ad_G:

Has anyone got TT on CityFibre or does Andrew have any speed test data to show which is the case?

That would be more interesting to see.

I can see the practical reasons why providers are uncomfortable offering high upload speeds on unlimited services.

There are limits to the amount anyone can meaningfully consume in the downstream direction: either you have to be consuming the stream as it comes in, or you have to be storing it somewhere to consume later. It's limited by the "demand" inside your household. There are only so many UHD programmes you can watch in a day, or the number of different PS5 games you can play.

However if you're serving content towards the Internet - acting as a bittorrent source for example - then the outbound link could easily be saturated 24x7, since the demand is generated by the rest of the world.

GPON has only 1.2G bandwidth in the upstream direction, shared between up to 32 users on a PON. It only takes one such user filling the outbound link continuously to degrade the service for everyone else.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

No equipment would be required. It would be whatever line profiles TT has asked Cityfibre to configure.

CityFibre don't offer asymmetric profiles on their network, which is why I said it would have to be on the TalkTalk side. Yes they could but it is a key differentiator for them, so asymmetric would have to be done by TT.