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When will you get superfast broadband?

Posted on 6 Nov 2009 at 15:14

To say Virgin milked its speed advantage over the ADSL providers is an understatement. When it first launched up-to-50Mbits/sec, it was charging more than £50 a month to customers who didn’t take the company’s TV services. The price has now fallen to £28 a month this autumn (provided you also rent your phone line from Virgin).

While the numbers look poor, if you compare Virgin to other providers then it’s pretty good

Virgin Media boasts that, unlike the ever-diminishing returns of ADSL, its cable network delivers the headline speeds. Is that true even of the 50Mbits/sec services? Andrew Ferguson, editor of Thinkbroadband.com, says his site’s speedtests show average actual download speeds of around only 30Mbits/sec. “While the numbers look poor, if you compare Virgin to other providers then it’s pretty good,” Ferguson adds.

Virgin also implements a fairly draconian traffic-management policy, which chokes the connection speed of customers who exceed a stated peak-time download limit. So although the lines may well be capable of 50Mbits/sec, that’s unlikely to be the actual speed many customers will see around-the-clock. However, at the time of going to press, Virgin was yet to implement traffic management on the 50Mbits/sec service.

Who will get 50Mbits/sec?

About half the population are covered by Virgin’s cable network – use the company’s postcode checker to find out if you’re in a cable region. Be aware that Virgin’s “off-net” ADSL services only hit a maximum of 20Mbits/sec. A Virgin Media spokesman told PC Pro the company had identified half a million homes to which expanding its cable network was viable, although most of those are “filling in the holes” in areas that already have cable coverage.

40Mbits/sec

While the chances of BT fibre running right to your front door are only marginally better than those of a National Lottery jackpot, it’s far more likely that you’re going to be within reach of the company’s fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) rollout.

BT says the up-to-40Mbits/sec FTTC lines will be available to 10 million homes by 2012, and it’s already announced the names of almost 100 telephone exchanges that will receive FTTC by the beginning of next summer. BT is keen to stress that it’s considering both urban and rural areas with its fibre rollout, although the majority of exchanges that have been announced to date are urban areas already covered by Virgin.

FTTC sees fibre running from the local exchange to the green cabinets you often find on street corners. BT is having to install dedicated fibre cabinets alongside the existing telephone cabinets as part of the rollout (a move that hasn’t gone down well with some of the residents in Muswell Hill, who objected to the “eyesores”).

Consequently, the final stretch of the connection running from the cabinet to your front door is still a twisted copper pair, thus hampering the headline speeds to less than half of that offered by FTTP. It also means connection speeds will degrade over distance, leaving many with lines that fall well below the stated maximum.