How does FTTC compare w/Virgin?

Longtime (and suffering) VM customer. I'm curious if anyone had the opportunity to compare FTTC speeds and latency with VM?

Currently on the 120MB product - I find that despite the speeds I still see a fair amount of congestion/buffering - probably due to the fact that VM is quite popular in my neighbourhood.

Now that my area finally has FTTC, I've been thinking about making the switch.

Any advice/suggestions appreciated.

Virgin is FTTC. I'm assuming you mean BT's new infinity offerings, which are also FTTC. The only difference is the delivery - DOCSIS or VDSL.

I was in the same situation as you. I got IDNET FTTC as soon as it came to my area. I kept my Virgin line as backup. FTTC was good but after about 3 months Virgin congestion had pretty much disappeared. After another year I dropped the FTTC.

I'm not sure why Virgin got better, coincidence or if it was related to FTTC. Maybe customers deserted to FTTC leaving the line less congested or maybe Virgin introduced upgrades to ensure they were competitive with FTTC.

But the long and short is it may be worth waiting a few months.

To contradict the earlier reply VM cable isn't FTTC it is a completely different technology -

BT Infinity will offer you a lower headline download speed than is possible with cable but a much higher upstream.

Jitter tends to be high on cable - particulaurly upstream jitter and is pretty much absent on FTTC, This is down to the way cable works.

You can get cable broadband without any need for a phone line. FTTC still requires a phone line for last leg delivery.

Cable performance is normally OK but some areas can suffer from very high congestion and that often takes an age to get sorted out - by area I mean just a few streets. You'll often see posts asking what performance is like in the first bit of a postcode and that can be meaningless as the granularity is much less than that.

Reliability in my experience is slightly down on ADSL with several short outages a year ever since I've had it wheras ADSL virtually never went down.

Thanks everyone for the replies. I guess my big question is whether FTTC suffers the same congestion from over-subscription (eg: contention) that cable does. The VM engineers have come out countless times to do repulls and the like, but the randomness of the quality remains.

The other thing I didn't point out, if I switched to TalkTalk or Infinity, I can get pretty much the same quality of TV (in my case, kids channels) with a much lower bill. Right now I'm paying £100 a month for VM....

Convention is to refer to DOCSIS networks as FTTN, the architecture is different because of the timeslicing of DOCSIS on the final metaliic cable segments

With FTTC the bandwidth is dedicated to the cabinet, then between cabinet and handover node (i.e. exchange) Openreach operate a 15 Mbps allocation for 40 Meg and 30 Meg for 80 Meg customers. So congestion is unlikely on the part Openreach control. What the ISP does at the exchange is the difference between Sky/BT/TalkTalk

http://blog.thinkbroadband.com/2013/03/uk-broadband-...

Shows a national comparison between the services.

FTTN - which is what you call DOCSIS - has the issue where in addition to the capacity sharing from the fibre node (no idea what figures Virgin Media works to), there is the time slicing which means a user or two in the same street can impact your performance.

It all depends on what others do in your area really.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Convention is to refer to DOCSIS networks as FTTN, the architecture is different because of the timeslicing of DOCSIS on the final metaliic cable segments

The definitions are weird. FTTC doesn't actually stand for FTTCabinet but FTTCurb. Usually taken as meaning that the fibre is terminated within 300m of CPE in all instances.

FTTCabinet is actually FTTNode/FTTCurb + VDSL - see deployments by Deutsche Telekom, AT&T, KPN, etc, referred to as FTTNode.

The actual FTTx definition doesn't care about what is being transmitted down the line - there are the odd DOCSIS networks that are RFoG - RF over Glass - these are still FTTP.

Perhaps I should have said UK convention

As oppossed to any danger of implying a world wide standard for these things.

Agreed. Most UK residents would equate FTTC with the Openreach infrastructure re-sold by BT as Infinity and several others as their fibre offering.

OK maybe they wouldn't but I certainly do..

virgin FTTN can be problematic if to many are connected to the same node (like where i live) and the result is Packet loss on some of the congested upstream channels (lucky the one i am locked onto is mostly ok, but my next door and person over the road are not so lucky)
problem VM make the issue Worse by upgrading users to the super-hub and upgrading there speeds and in turn giving users more upload speed to trash the upstream even more if any thing they need to Drop the upload speed for every one, and only up it when the node has more upstream channels, for the most part you got to think of VM cable as Wifi with loads of channels once they get saturated it starts to brake (norm around 70-80% load)

where as BT FTTC is mostly like ADSL at the exchange just a lot closer and tad a lot faster normally and working QOS (drop speed to keep packet loss at bay) where as you treat each BT FTTC or ADSL as an Dedicated connection for the most part

check out my funky BQM stats in my sig

once BT FTTC comes VM will lose at least half or more customers where i live including me maybe (depends if we can lose enough VM customers to drop the ping to good level my next door is thinking of going full sky and live with sub 1mb ADSL until FTTC comes, better off with slow speed 30-40ping, then 50-300ping+ packet loss on VM (as he cant game with 5-20% packet loss)

Hi Guys,

Thought I'd give my view. I've been on Virgin Cable for a long time and recently my cab was enabled. At the same time I noticed my VM Cable performance has dramatically improved, I notice I now have 6/7 Downstream channels and 2 upstream channels. I joined up with Sky FTTC and unfortunately the maximum speed attainable for myself is 45mb, as the cab is very far away. I also have issues with my home wiring which has led to further problems. I did a few speed tests and downloaded several files to compare speeds, on Virgin I was getting a good throughput of around 3.1mb/s on sky fttc I was getting around 2.6mb/s. The upstream on sky fttc was of course much better!

I kept my Virgin Cable as a backup and have now cancelled my Sky FTTC and stuck with VM Cable. So just a note if your going for FTTC make sure your home wiring is up to scratch and not star wired like mine!

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

The definitions are weird. FTTC doesn't actually stand for FTTCabinet but FTTCurb.

Nice try, but in the UK this would be Fibre To The Kerb (FTTK)!

In reply to a post by John_Gray:

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

The definitions are weird. FTTC doesn't actually stand for FTTCabinet but FTTCurb.

Nice try, but in the UK this would be Fibre To The Kerb (FTTK)!

Interesting turn of phrase, however we're the country that gave birth to fibre optic broadband for cable and telephony terms are worldwide I'll stick with FTTCurb. I seriously doubt that in Netherlands, Japan and Germany the letters hold true as acronyms for either fibre to the curb, cabinet, premises or node but that's what they're called.

If FTTN/C+VDSL were allowed to be called FTTCabinet Virgin and other cable operators should also be considered FTTC in areas where they've no further cabinets serving customers, such as those areas where the rest of the plant is purely underground.

I'll stick with the internationally held definitions over BT's press releases, for the sake of consistency, until such a time as I see KPN announce glasfiber naar de beteugelen and Deutsche Telekom Faser an den Stra�enrand. My apologies to people who do actually speak those languages, that was a Google Translate job.

We're not the centre of the telecommunications universe and the definitions are there to avoid ambiguity, which they do well so long as everyone plays. Check international coverage on BT's deployment and you'll find numerous references to FTTN.

Edited by deleted (Fri 15-Mar-13 17:42:06)

FTTK would be right in front of the house (that's how most role outs of FTTP happen, you just make your own trench from house to curb, lay the provided fibre and Plug in the fibre box that is just out side your gate)

most call it fibre to the cab FTTC

(Cool TB site your forums support the save data when typing stuff in (this pc BSOD twice and i still had this post when i pressed back )

I've been on Virgin cable for a year.
Don't care personally for download speed - for me it's all about the latency.
First 8 months were OK - 60-100ms ping and only occasional packet loss (compared to Zen ADSL I was always 30-50ms and 0 packet loss).
However in Decemeber pings crept up over 100ms midday to 4pm and then got really bad with 20% packet loss that lasted from 4pm- midnight.
When I called they told the "over-utilisation" issue will be fixed IN APRIL. I had 12 hours or so outage this weekend and pings/packet loss seem much better. Perhaps it's been fixed early... we shall see!

on Friday morning (around 8:30am) they seem to have enabled 2 upload channels now all ping monitors for my street are now normal 2 other houses are no longer at 5-40% packet loss but ping is still getting to around 150ms ish at peak time (one of them cant really be fixed as the modem is not where it should be)

YouTube now works correctly (no buffering issues as they no longer have packet loss) and i get constant 12mb on me phone where it was better to turn off wifi before as my 3g connection on my phone was better

log into your modem 192.168.0.1 or 1.1 click on status top right and click on upstream you probably see that there is 2 channels working (before it would of been 1) so the load seems to get spread across the channels (like the downstream)