In reply to a post by pyarwood:

you do know virgin media is just NTL rebranded to virgin media to keep telewest customers happy dont you.

Its a bit more complex, but I assume you know the actual history? I visited the old HQ offices in Hook a few times for my job, long before I was a customer.

NTL & Telewest merged == ntl:telewest Ltd
ntl:telewest Ltd then purchase Virgin Mobile from Richard Branson to offer "quad play" to compete with BT & Sky
Renamed the combined entity "Virgin Media" and offer the same products group wide.

If you go back to the history of NTL it includes a lot of companies, and in my area was "International CableTel" that bought National Transcommunications Ltd (of Crawley Court, Crawley, Hampshire) and gained the initials NTL.

Lots of web pages out there.

In reply to a post by XGS_Is_On:

Not so odd: VM can't manage devices if they don't have IP addresses. Not that they can't support bridge mode on XGSPON but that they lose management of the Hub if they do. All the hubs on the RF network have at least one IP address all the time regardless of operating mode.

Really? No VLAN for management? How do Openreach and CityFibre and the AltNet's manage the ONTs then? Given the hidden web page that works I have to conclude its a cost decision around support, and that they don't have a 2.5GbE port on the 5x.

Its also gone a bit further than that john C malone who originally was in charge of telewest owns Liberty global who bought virgin media so essentially its now back to be telewest.

Edited by pyarwood (Tue 25-Mar-25 07:03:29)

In reply to a post by pyarwood:

Its also gone a bit further than that john C malone who originally was in charge of telewest owns Liberty global who bought virgin media so essentially its now back to be telewest.

Malone is a billionare with hundreds of investments. And Liberty now only own 50% of Virgin Media, since the merger with O2 the other half is Telefonica. I doubt John himself has any interest in day to day operations, more concerned about a return on investment surely, now he is 84.

Liberty global bought NTL:Telewest in 2013 and he is OWNER so only 8 years after NTL aquired telewest (and wrote off millions in debt of the 2 companies. you think the old owner telewest had nothing to do with it acquiring his old company back.

he was 72 when liberty bought ntl and it was no where near merging with o2 then

This is quite off topic now. I don't think ownership of large companies by insanely huge investment organisations is relevant. They're looking for return on investment over the long term.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In reply to a post by XGS_Is_On:

VM can't manage devices if they don't have IP addresses.

OLTs and ONTs communicate using special management frames. The OLT collects data from the ONT about status, light levels etc.

Which doesn't really help when your management platform runs via TR-069. OMCI doesn't have that and VM need APIs into Nexfibre to get that stuff anyways.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Really? No VLAN for management? How do Openreach and CityFibre and the AltNet's manage the ONTs then? Given the hidden web page that works I have to conclude its a cost decision around support, and that they don't have a 2.5GbE port on the 5x.

Openreach, CityFibre, etc, manage ONTs via OMCI usually. This runs between OLT and ONT only and has the functionality you'd expect. VM don't own the OLTs so have to rely on Nexfibre to provide an API and they manage CPE over TR-069 on the cable network with basic stats pulled via SNMP, both of these requiring an IP address.

In reply to a post by aidanh:

Why can't they assign some internal management address to the hub for management purposes (on a private VLAN that hopefully doesn't collide with the customers LAN)? I think they could support modem mode if they really wanted to, they just don't care enough to implement it properly.

Up until recently all the XGSPON punters were on someone else's network. VM receive a single VLAN via VPWS per customer.