Welcome CLOKent.

Good to have somebody from VM here to help with info.

Do you know if a Thanet specific press release will be made by VM? The Kent generic one obviously doesn't mention Thanet directly:
http://www.virginmedia.com/corporate/media-centre/pr...

Edited by deleted (Mon 15-May-17 18:57:36)

Some cabinets have already been installed this week. These ones are much smaller than BT cabinets and a light grey/off-white colour.

Yup, they are smaller and will be different in size and colour to the Openreach cab's. There will be quite a few as well.

The complaints about them popping up have also started to come in. You just can't please some people by bringing them potential ultrafast broadband!!

Thats good to know, my estate apears scheduled for late July early August. My line rental saver with PN expires September.

No surprises there, some people have nothing better to do.

In reply to a post by R0NSKI:

No surprises there, some people have nothing better to do.

as long as they get completed before the 5 people in your area have a chance to stop it (really it is a small amount of people or land owners that have stopped or delayed BT roll outs of FTTC in some areas)

it would be nice to have FTTP virgin bb (even though its still coxa inside the house) that would remove the street level congestion with the FTTN setup (i assume that is the HFC setup?)

congestion in most cases is on the coxa side of the main FTTN cab (the one that hums and has 4 doors) that the smaller green cabs feed off, fiber feed coming into the cab is norm fine

(MrSaffron) this is why when we say congestion won't be a problem on FTTP on virgin, we are directing it at local congestion problems at the street level that virgin has in some streets, FTTP virgin would mostly remove as a problem as fiber networks are not typically congested (even if it is normally you not notice it) on ADSL/VDSL/FTTP lines (openreach) i yet to see congestion that makes it unusable or even slow down (unless its talktalk or sky on the slow down part due to not buying enough capacity in some areas in the past)

as its really Pot luck when your on normal virgin coxa network if your street is congested or not and VM refuse to fix it until next DOCSIS technology comes out (really wish they would be fined for failing to add more capacity) virgin really needs to get QOS in there FTTN nodes as they don't seem to have any at all witch results in poor service in congested areas which them makes the problem even worse as DOCSIS fails apart when its congested (streaming and gaming becomes a problem, due to packet loss and high pings)

the only reason my connection is more or less fine now is due to 3.0 upgrade which added more capacity vs 2.0 (so cheap fix as all they did was replace the cards in the cab)

Edited by leexgx (Sun 21-May-17 21:45:03)

In reply to a post by leexgx:

it would be nice to have FTTP virgin bb (even though its still coxa inside the house) that would remove the street level congestion with the FTTN setup (i assume that is the HFC setup?)

congestion in most cases is on the coxa side of the main FTTN cab (the one that hums and has 4 doors) that the smaller green cabs feed off, fiber feed coming into the cab is norm fine

the only reason my connection is more or less fine now is due to 3.0 upgrade which added more capacity vs 2.0 (so cheap fix as all they did was replace the cards in the cab)

Just a few points about this.

The cabinet with 4 doors that hums is not providing you broadband, it's for telephony.

The congestion is not on the coxa / coax / coaxial side of the nodal cabinet, it's on a line card at a Virgin Media hubsite feeding your area. There is actually plenty of bandwidth available on the fibre and, usually, the coaxial network isn't full either, but there aren't enough channels provisioned for you on the kit at the Virgin Media site and/or there are too many customers sharing those channels.

Your move from DOCSIS 2 to DOCSIS 3 was not replacement of line cards. You were moved to an entirely different router at VM. Cisco uBR 7246VXR -> Cisco uBR 10k or Motorola BSR 64k.

There are no cards in the cabinet that provides your broadband. The bit that terminates the fibre is similar to this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKBBzAIjPyM - but does not deliver telephony, that would require telephony to be delivered over coax which VM's is not bar a very few trial areas.

Edited by deleted (Sun 21-May-17 22:44:11)

the smaller cabs at the street level (repeaters) run off the larger cab that has phone and fiber to COXA that feeds the smaller cabs, only the larger cab has the fiber, one large FTTN node can be serving 20-30 smaller street cabs which lies the problem with not enough channels in the main cab,

unless they have changed that recently (like putting the actual FTTN node at the per street cab level, like g.fast was supposed to be on poles or just before/on each street)

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

you can be 2-3 streets over and be on a different large cab that is feeding that street small cab and your data speeds/packet reliability can be fine

i dont care to much about speed its more when its dropping packets enough that its affecting its use as most would not notice if your 200mb connection was doing 20-50mb as long as it can play videos they wont notice it (most of the time that the best wireless can do any way unless its using the 5ghz side)

It think they might have changed it. VM are currently putting FTTP in Lewes where I work occasionally and there is on of the small cabinets just up the road from the office. There was a guy working inside it a couple of weeks ago and it definitely had what looked like a node in the cabinet on the left hand side.

In reply to a post by leexgx:

the smaller cabs at the street level (repeaters) run off the larger cab that has phone and fiber to COXA that feeds the smaller cabs, only the larger cab has the fiber, one large FTTN node can be serving 20-30 smaller street cabs which lies the problem with not enough channels in the main cab,

unless they have changed that recently (like putting the actual FTTN node at the per street cab level, like g.fast was supposed to be on poles or just before/on each street)

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

you can be 2-3 streets over and be on a different large cab that is feeding that street small cab and your data speeds/packet reliability can be fine

i dont care to much about speed its more when its dropping packets enough that its affecting its use as most would not notice if your 200mb connection was doing 20-50mb as long as it can play videos they wont notice it (most of the time that the best wireless can do any way unless its using the 5ghz side)

Wow, late response.

The smaller cabinets aren't repeaters.

It's fibre to coax, short for coaxial, not COXA.

Not sure what channels have to do with number of other cabinets being served. Purely about bandwidth utilisation. There are nodes running fine passing a thousand or more homes and nodes that are struggling passing 200 homes. As previously mentioned there is no concept of channels on the 'main' cabinet. It converts optical to RF and RF to optical, it has no concept of anything else and has no line cards in it.

The diagram is simplified. Telco MSANs do not share cabinets with HFC nodes, nor do they share fibre backhaul. The telco MSAN has resilient fibre backhaul, the HFC nodes are single-homed.

Unsure what your second to last paragraph is trying to say.

2.4 GHz WiFi goes well over 20-50Mb. You can put a 1 in front of that and you're about there, that with an 802.11n 2x2 radio, such as the one in the laptop I'm typing this from, while pulling a file from a local server wirelessly at 19MB/s