Thanks that does seem to match what I’ve read since starting this thread.

In my part of the town nexfibre roadworks are only initial works fixing ducts etc whereas other areas have started microtrenching to each property.

I have however seen openreach FTTP equipment on poles closer to me than I had seen before which is promising too.

I’m hoping the lack of work in my area is more related to our current services using poles for the final customer connection whereas the newer areas of town have more underground services.

I guess there has to be a transition point between technologies but it is slightly annoying to have an interim RFoG product. I guess the benefit of it is it supports proper VM TV.

RFoG enabled all the internal stuff to be done by existing engineers without any additional training requirements - it's just DOCSIS and all the existing tools worked with it, and it allowed VM to build fibre while kicking the can down the road a bit in terms of what they were going to put on the end of it.

It would have been nice if the time that was bought by taking this approach had been used to launch some interesting services and develop streaming TV with a delay comparable to a satellite broadcast (should be easy since the physical and IP network belongs to one company) but they seem to have not tried to do this. I don't really think that fibre directly into the "Hub" is a great idea either, a wall mounted ONT at least gives the cable half a chance of surviving in a house.

In reply to a post by drefsab:

tv service could be provided by a streaming box but it will just utilize your broadband connection.

VM already have such a service, as do Sky of course:
https://www.virginmedia.com/tv/stream

Adtran make ONTs that are XGS-PON compatible but have 1 Gigabit Ethernet connections. Hopefully any FTTP network building in 2023 is using XGS-PON, the Alt Nets in my town are already and I read even Openreach are moving that way. CityFibre have said they are retrofitting older areas.

I suspect this is about ensuring more people can get higher upload speeds in high usage scenarios, rather than selling faster products. (Community Fibre in London do have a 3 Gbit/s option for lots of money).