City Fibre 5Gb

I've just noticed that Sky are offering 5Gb connections on City Fibre in my area, which led me to
https://cityfibre.com/news/cityfibre-unveils-new-5-5...
At £80 per month for the Sky service I won't be rushing to sign up.

Edited by ParksidePeter (Fri 22-Aug-25 17:44:17)

Part of the ever increasing gap between the Openreach (OR) offerings and the others, including YouFibre's 8 Gigabit at £99.99/month. OR are so far likely ignoring as all of these have very limited national coverage, although if CityFibre complete their network upgrade to offer this in all places, that will be notable. Nexfibre (half owned by VM) are talking similar speeds, but today only offering 2 Gigabit, but they charge extra for symmetric.

I assume takeup of these services over 1 Gigabit are quite low, so whilst easier to offer on XGS-PON, these are more a marketing attempt to get customers over OR. OR have a much bigger reach, that it will take some more consolidation for them to be worried by any of this.

It is a shame OR are not offering symmetric options, even for additional money... but most obviously they feel they don't have to.

5Gb/s for £80, a bargain

In reply to a post by jchamier:

OR are so far likely ignoring as all of these have very limited national coverage

... and because almost nobody apart from a tiny minority of broadband nerds have any interest in such speeds. OR is interested in the 99%, not the 1%.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

... and because almost nobody apart from a tiny minority of broadband nerds have any interest in such speeds. OR is interested in the 99%, not the 1%.

Agreed, I'm more interested in reliability than speed; I will move to the first provider that can solve the various MDU issues, and get me away from VM's coax network with its falling apart street cabinets, but I don't need more than 300 to 500 Mbps, I would prefer faster upload than 20 Mbps, symmetric 300 would be ideal for me.

That is amazing, considering it was not that many years ago we were using dial up

But, it is a niche product, more niche than 2Gb, a lot of people don't even need 1Gb, never mid those speeds. If someone has a large house and a lot of people living then, then maybe, or a HOMO, ideal.
Most peoples devices would not cope with the speed, even a lot of PCs still have 1Gb Ethernet.

As been said, reliability is the thing and I prefer reliability against speed, saying that with fibre it should be reliable, after all we are told time and time again about how reliable it is.

It does show one thing, that other network providers are knocking the spots of Openreach technology wise and if it takes some customers off Openreach, it makes me happy.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

That is amazing, considering it was not that many years ago we were using dial up

But, it is a niche product, more niche than 2Gb, a lot of people don't even need 1Gb, never mid those speeds. If someone has a large house and a lot of people living then, then maybe, or a HOMO, ideal.

QoS would allow you manage many people on 80 to 100mbit connection. Except most people don't use QoS.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Most peoples devices would not cope with the speed, even a lot of PCs still have 1Gb Ethernet.

Its beyond 5gbits connections you start to run into expense. Plus windows isn't really designed for 10gbit plus connections. Linux is fine, it will run at 10gbits plus all day long, put a windows to linux connection in, enjoy the fun and games.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

As been said, reliability is the thing and I prefer reliability against speed, saying that with fibre it should be reliable, after all we are told time and time again about how reliable it is.

fibre is better in that theres no crosstalk, your connection speed doesn't change with new people on your pon* its weather resistant etc. It can still break in many ways but its more unlikely compared to copper. Overhead and wind is its greatest Nemesis

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

It does show one thing, that other network providers are knocking the spots of Openreach technology wise and if it takes some customers off Openreach, it makes me happy.

OR is reluctant to do symmetrical speeds because its their belief that it will hurt their "business offerings".

But how many fall for te hype and sign up for connections way faster than they need? They believe they are getting a faster product that will enhance their "experience" whereas in reaity all they are getting is a product beyond their needs that will decrease their bank balance.

In reply to a post by Taras:

QoS would allow you manage many people on 80 to 100mbit connection. Except most people don't use QoS.

I know plenty of large businesses that have 1000+ staff on a 200/200 symmetric connection. Using a "leased line" circuit because of the repair and support benefits.

Its beyond 5gbits connections you start to run into expense. Plus windows isn't really designed for 10gbit plus connections. Linux is fine, it will run at 10gbits plus all day long, put a windows to linux connection in, enjoy the fun and games.

We have a lot of Windows servers on 10GbE and even 25GbE... I think you may want to check.

We used to say it was the video makers (e.g. YouTube) that needed the high data rates, now it is the game players, e.g. Stream users, that drive the massive download volumes. They are the ones buying the 500 and 1 Gb connections.

fibre is better in that theres no crosstalk, your connection speed doesn't change with new people on your pon* its weather resistant etc. It can still break in many ways but its more unlikely compared to copper. Overhead and wind is its greatest Nemesis

The benefits of OTDR in finding a break accurately is useful to speed fault fixing.

OR is reluctant to do symmetrical speeds because its their belief that it will hurt their "business offerings".

Almost every other business that did this, lost the other business in the end. Look at IBM and their inability to deliver the 80386 chip as it was "too powerful compared to our mid range" in the 1980s, and so Compaq created the first "clone" and then IBM eventually exited the PC market. There are other examples.

I think BT Group CEO Alison Roberts is aware of this in the interview she gave; they're not expecting to be the physical network everywhere anymore... and of course maybe that would be good for BT Group as they could have less regulation. I don't see it happening!

Not directed at you but I a reply needs to be a reply to a post so...

Please can people stop indulging Adrian's thread derails about how the only sensible broadband related decision is the exact one he's happened to make?

In reply to a post by Taras:

QoS would allow you manage many people on 80 to 100mbit connection. Except most people don't use QoS.

That is true, i mucked around with it years agao, but I have no real use for it.

Its beyond 5gbits connections you start to run into expense. Plus windows isn't really designed for 10gbit plus connections. Linux is fine, it will run at 10gbits plus all day long, put a windows to linux connection in, enjoy the fun and games.

My partner has a fibre network installed and it works pretty well, but she uses Macs. Had to use a USB to SPF converter for them, but even the old mac trashcan can top a decent speed on the network.
But most of us have good old gigabit Ethernet.

fibre is better in that theres no crosstalk, your connection speed doesn't change with new people on your pon* its weather resistant etc. It can still break in many ways but its more unlikely compared to copper. Overhead and wind is its greatest Nemesis

Apart from the first week or so on fibre, I have had no problems, but then I only had one major problem on FTTC in all the years I was on it.

OR is reluctant to do symmetrical speeds because its their belief that it will hurt their "business offerings".

And yet it may hurt them by not doing it.

In reply to a post by MHC:

But how many fall for te hype and sign up for connections way faster than they need? They believe they are getting a faster product that will enhance their "experience" whereas in reaity all they are getting is a product beyond their needs that will decrease their bank balance.

That is the problem, many people will think they need super-duper speed and when they get it will get nothing out of it. I got one of my brothers to get the speed reduced on his fibre and save money, he doesn't need 500Mb/s and never really needed it even when his wife was alive. Not sure why she thought they did.

In reply to a post by witchunt:

5Gb/s for £80, a bargain

Who need 5Gb/s for broadband?

In reply to a post by adslmax:

Who need 5Gb/s for broadband?

Anyone paying £80 or more for less. It is a free market, not for you or I to say who needs what. I'd be tempted if it was in my area.

In reply to a post by adslmax:

In reply to a post by witchunt:

5Gb/s for £80, a bargain

Who need 5Gb/s for broadband?

Nerds on a broadband forum.

In reply to a post by ParksidePeter:

I've just noticed that Sky are offering 5Gb connections on City Fibre in my area, which led me to
https://cityfibre.com/news/cityfibre-unveils-new-5-5...
At £80 per month for the Sky service I won't be rushing to sign up.

That’ll be the low watermark bench for pricing then. Starting to become more ‘’mainstream” at these sorts of bandwidths / mean speeds continue their inexorable creep up and up 🤣

Who needs a car that can travel at more than 70mph?

Who needs more then 640K of RAM or a monitor larger than 14 inches or for that matter there can't surely be a market for more than 5 computers in the whole wide world....

I had the ZX81 with 16K ram pack. More than enough!!!!

In reply to a post by broadband66:

I had the ZX81 with 16K ram pack. More than enough!!!!

I only had 1k, but quickly replaced with a Spectrunm 48k... no ram pack wobble problem until the Interface One issues

How do you define reliable?

Do you just mean uptime, or how about this,? The ability to do what you want when you want without services falling over?

Imagine being able to download whilst watching Netflix, Twitch etc., no drop of resolution or buffering. To me thats as much reliability as is service uptime. All without no QoS meddling on local setup.

Thats the real advantage, a connection that you wont or will rarely saturate, meaning everything just works.

RAM pack had to be placed on a piece of hardboard.

In reply to a post by broadband66:

RAM pack had to be placed on a piece of hardboard.

Whole setup was best on hardboard with some small risers to hold in place, ZX81 + rampack, or Spectrum + Interface 1 + MicroDrives.. ahh long time ago!

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

How do you define reliable?

Do you just mean uptime, or how about this,? The ability to do what you want when you want without services falling over?

Imagine being able to download whilst watching Netflix, Twitch etc., no drop of resolution or buffering. To me thats as much reliability as is service uptime. All without no QoS meddling on local setup.

Thats the real advantage, a connection that you wont or will rarely saturate, meaning everything just works.

I used to download and watch netflix or equivalent when I was on 36Mbs FTTC, downloading was not so fast, but it worked, as long as you remember to restrict it over wise it will take as much as it can and Netflix will have nothing, and it can still do that with higher speeds broadband.

As you said, the advantage of higher speed broadband is the bandwidth available to do more things faster, which for a lot of people will not make one bit of difference.

I bet if I went to the majority of people I know and had 1 Gb/s FTTP broadband service put into their house, they would not even notice, even those with a few people living there. Why? Because the majority of people use their broadband for streaming, maybe connecting their phones or tablets to and even those with computers, I doubt download large files.

All this you need 1Gb/s is a marketing ploy and now some people can get faster speeds, that will be a marketing ploy to get people to part with more money for a service they don't need.

My eldist brother have dropped from 500Mb\s to 120 or something like that, because it is cheaper and while he does download now and again for bits for Abaleton live, he don't stream as he is not a TV person and he may browse for different things and that si about it.
My partner have dropped from 900Mb/s to 200, realising that she never needed that speed.

Sure if you are going to make use of the speed then there is nothing wrong with going for it, not sure if anyone really need 5Gb/s, that would take some using, unless you have around 30 people in the same building using it at the same time, and then you need the internal network to cope with it which is another problem.

Internet providers will talk people into getting these faster speeds, because you can do everything faster, but the user will not do be able to do anything faster as they have not got the equipment to do it, even if it did make a difference.

Video will only stream so fast, music takes very little even high def, browsing, people will not notice any difference, reading their emails, texting with WhatsApp or RCS or any other thing like that is not going to make their text get to the other person any quicker.

You get to a certain point where things are so fast, you notice little difference, the ones on here on about ZX81, or about more than 640K of ram and faster CPUs, if you're going down that road then you can say, why did we come off dial up or ADSL. Apart from the odd thing, like games because they tend to use faster tech, if I stuck to say my AMD ryzen 7 1700 based computer in front of you or many people to be honest and also a machine with a AMD Ryzen 7 8700F, with the same amount of ram in and maybe the same video card. You would say the 8700 on benchmarks would be a lot faster than my old CPU and you would be right, it is. But would you notice in normal use?
Even video editing, the difference is minimal, maybe 30 seconds longer on the older machine to render on a 1-hour-long video. If you are just browsing and doing a bit of office stuff, you certainly would not notice.

That is why I am dithering to update my PC, it is only used for games mainly these days, but older games, it works, sure it is 8 years old now, well the board, CPU and some of the memory is, but for the most part it is still workingish.

Just trying to get though that a lot of people would not notice any difference in speed whatsoever. As for reliability, if it does what I need and works when I want it to, then that to me is reliability.

Sorry about it being so long.

In reply to a post by broadband66:

RAM pack had to be placed on a piece of hardboard.
I had a memotech ramp pack, made not to wobble

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by broadband66:

RAM pack had to be placed on a piece of hardboard.

Whole setup was best on hardboard with some small risers to hold in place, ZX81 + rampack, or Spectrum + Interface 1 + MicroDrives.. ahh long time ago!

The microdrives were amazing for the time, you think these were the days, where most people were using cassette and then on the spectrum you could have these drives that were fast, well faster, and they could go to the file you needed without pressing play or pause. The only places most people at that time have seen anything like that is in films, and they were big reels of tape. I know someone people knock him, but Clive was a genius, and he did get a lot of people including myself into computers. Sure he had some duds, the C5 for one, but he was right, electric vehicles were the thing of the future and this what is happening now.

I am on 220 FTTP, getting ~205 up and ~30 down. It is adequate. Of all the possible upgrades, raw headline speed does not interest me. I would actually prefer to go symmetric at 200. Marketing departments are getting this wrong by making symmetric the upgrade after all speed upgrades. It should the basic upgrade these days. We are no longer constrained by ADSL, where the asymmetric speeds were the optimum use of restricted bandwidth. But so much of the thinking these days around FTTP still seems to be constrained by the requirements of ADSL.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Sorry about it being so long.

You've managed to convince yourself the difference between the technology (VDSL/FTTC) and others (FTTP).

In reply to a post by DFScale:

But so much of the thinking these days around FTTP still seems to be constrained by the requirements of ADSL.

I assume this is what the sales department at the huge networks (VM & OR) think is the only way to protect their revenue from business circuits/leased lines.They appear to be working to the assumption (even after pandemic) that home users only upload emails and keystrokes.

VDSL and DOCSIS coax were symmetric due to the technology, but anything newer does not have to be, it is being artificially limited.

In reply to a post by DFScale:

I am on 220 FTTP, getting ~205 up and ~30 down. It is adequate. Of all the possible upgrades, raw headline speed does not interest me. I would actually prefer to go symmetric at 200. Marketing departments are getting this wrong by making symmetric the upgrade after all speed upgrades. It should the basic upgrade these days. We are no longer constrained by ADSL, where the asymmetric speeds were the optimum use of restricted bandwidth. But so much of the thinking these days around FTTP still seems to be constrained by the requirements of ADSL.

This is openreach for you, that is the way they are, also this is the UK, we are normally behind other countries and now we have fast broadband, our government is taking us more into being a nanny state, so what is the point?

In reply to a post by jchamier:

You've managed to convince yourself the difference between the technology (VDSL/FTTC) and others (FTTP).

I have known the difference for years, even before FTTP was a thing in most of the country.

In reply to a post by DFScale:

I am on 220 FTTP, getting ~205 up and ~30 down. It is adequate. Of all the possible upgrades, raw headline speed does not interest me. I would actually prefer to go symmetric at 200. Marketing departments are getting this wrong by making symmetric the upgrade after all speed upgrades. It should the basic upgrade these days. We are no longer constrained by ADSL, where the asymmetric speeds were the optimum use of restricted bandwidth. But so much of the thinking these days around FTTP still seems to be constrained by the requirements of ADSL.

Same here, but the questions the marketing departments will have are:
1. how many people want 200/200 over 200/30?
2. how much extra would they be prepared to pay?

If the answers are "not many" and "nothing or very little", then there's no business case.

You can't(*) get 200 upload today, but you can get 115 - for I guess around £15 per month more than you're currently paying. Presumably the extra upload speed isn't worth that much to you?

I am on 330/50; I could get the 115 upload from the same provider for an extra £10. It's the difference between uploading 2.5GB in 7 minutes or 3 minutes. Either way, I'd have to do something else while it takes place in the background, so it doesn't make much difference in reality.

(*) Almost nobody sells the 1000/220 tier, not even BT. Cerberus is the only one I know - and they charge £212 per month plus £594 activation.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

(*) Almost nobody sells the 1000/220 tier, not even BT. Cerberus is the only one I know - and they charge £212 per month plus £594 activation.

Yeah shocking to be honest with 220 upload u pay expensive monthy fee and activate fee

https://i.ibb.co/PZPfsRKv/Screenshot-from-2025-09-01...

Edited by adslmax (Mon 01-Sep-25 22:04:13)

There is little evidence either way.

BT have their own reasons for not making symmetrical speeds affordable on their network. The reason no one is selling the 1000/220 tier might be something to do with what OR are charging for it?

We had the same arguments for FTTP, before OR started their FTTP rollout, the argument was there is no demand for the speeds, so as such there is no need for OR to do such a rollout. Marketing controls the demand, Altnets rolled in to town, suddenly a business case appeared for OR to do the rollout, and now marketing is in overdrive to generate that demand.

The prime driver for OR right now is keeping their customers, in non FTTP areas they are losing them, it does seem based on evidence their highly artificially asymmetrical FTTP product is enough to stem the flow, so because of that and their vested interest for market segmentation, it has unfavourable upload speeds, I think it is nothing more complex then that.

The surcharge for a boost in upload speeds is a legacy of the existing big players, VM charge for it on their XGS, and OR treat it as some kind of premium, but its bog standard inclusive on the alt nets.

If the day ever comes OR want to push higher upload speeds, then marketing will generate the demand for it.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

(*) Almost nobody sells the 1000/220 tier, not even BT. Cerberus is the only one I know - and they charge £212 per month plus £594 activation.

https://www.brsk.co.uk/

I'm on the 500/500 tier at £25pm fixed for 2 years. It was an early order last October, not installed until May. They had trouble getting telegraph poles up in some parts of the estate. The 150/150 was £19 at the time.

We were talking about Openreach there. Openreach FTTP only offers up to 1000/220 (or 1800/120).

If you have an altnet available then yes, they generally do offer symmetric speeds.

I was replying to your " Almost nobody sells the 1000/220 tier, not even BT. Cerberus is the only one I know - and they charge £212 per month plus £594 activation. In an overall thread about CityFibre (and Sky) 5Gb . I gave another example of fast symmetrics up to 2Gbps. At £55pm for that speed.

That post having been a reply to DFScale bemoaning the fact that Openreach don't offer 200 symmetric.