What percentage of Virgin's cable is Optical Fibre

I think that no-one has Optical Fibre cable right into their home, and instead it is co-axial cable (the same as TV arial cable) that comes into the home.

The cable that comes into your home comes from a box in the street, usually underneath a manhole. In the jargon that is a 'street cabinet'.

But I want to know whether ALL of the street cabinets are served by Optical Fibre? Or, are some street cabinets served by older types of cable?
Richard

I believe (may be wrong) that the areas where the backhaul from cabinet to cable servers is not fibre are restricted to analogue TV coverage, rather than the full digital TV/broadband package.

I thought Telewest had upgraded all of its areas, but think some old NTL areas may still have this topology

In the same vein, do you happen to know the speed of the backhaul from the street cabinets?

(I assume this is the main bottleneck affecting speed during peak times on busy streets...)

Malcolm

No, unlikely.

The slowdown will be caused at the local UBR(s) not the street cabs. I'm not sure what the actual throughput of the fiber to the cabs are, but I highly doubt its low enough for a street to affect it.

The UBR I'm currently connected to has a 40mbit pipe attached to it. I believe this area has around 6 in total, so thats around 240mbit bandwidth, assuming the UBRs don't have multiple links attached to them. Doesn't really seem a lot for the, possibly 1000+ customers they could be serving in this area.

is a unknown.

My old address was a analogue tv area but did have 10meg broadband, it must have had some fiber back to the headend else the distance would have been too long on the copper run. My cabinet was about 3 streets away. Then again ntl use boosters so maybe this allows much longer copper runs then BT get away with.

My current address is analogue tv and no broadband at all.

I heard the radio advert and its nowhere near as bad as people are making out.

1 - It doesnt specify fibre is delivered to the premises.
2 - It correctly specifies cable doesnt suffer from the distance related problems adsl does. About time they used this in advertising.

I can see why the fuss has been brought up tho probably mainly from pro adsl people but if this becomes a big issue then the issue of adsl advertising speeds it cannot deliver and the unlimited saga should also be brought into this.