City Fibre
 

Hi,the streets all around Edinburgh have/are being dug up by City Fibre/Vodaphone.https://www.cityfibre.com/gigabit-cities/

Will this affect my Virgin broadband,or is this a completely separate operation and has no impact on Virgin broadband services..

Re: city fibre
 

CityFibre is a competitor. It won't directly affect Virgin, although I guess a bit of local competition may prompt Virgin to offer better deals in time.

Re: city fibre
 

It won't affect Virgin as it's a different network, unless they cut through your cable! :D

Re: city fibre
 

They could well connect fibre to your house via your telegraph pole so shouldn't come anywhere near your VM connection.

Re: city fibre
 

City fibre have been doing parts of Southend for three years now, they cut quite a few connections round here. They are also very slow at getting things done some trenches were left open for weeks.
My Road was dug up over a year ago and still no sign of being able to connect. I believe only a very small area was connected up in 2019.

Re: city fibre
 

I've heard some good reports about City Fibre, but admittedly the contractors that they use to install their infrastructure need to buck their ideas up.

Re: city fibre
 

Just been reading that, as City Fibre are connected to Vodafone, anyone in an area where they operate can access super fast speeds on their phone.

Anyone know any more about this?

Re: city fibre
 

City fibre are deploying a fibre network and any internet provider in any area could supply services over their network. At present they have deal with Vodafone to use their network but it not as exclusive a deal as it was at first

https://www.telcotitans.com/vodafone...e/1010.article

City Fibre are a genuine national player. They’re building metro/access full fibre networks and they’re nationally connected via the old Torch fibre rings they bought from KCom a few years ago.

Although speaking to people, they’re not getting great penetration. Less than 20% i was told. To be fair their roll out costs may be lower using BT PIA & poles and therefore not digging, but still, I was always on the impression generally that less than 30% penetration was an issue v the cost of investment.

I think any altnet going up against a VM cabled area is a risky proposition. Certainly in Virgin areas it is pretty much accepted that “first in wins”. Insofar that anyone that fibres a new town will pretty much deter anyone else from fibre-ing it. BT have an obligation to, so that would mean a minimum of two full fibre providers everywhere, and a third will rarely be viable.

Re: city fibre
 

The abysmal VM customer service is putting off a lot though. From reading posts, a lot only stay for the speed that they need from VM, so hopefully competition from City Fibre will either allow people to dump VM or force VM to improve.

Re: city fibre
 

Grass is always greener....

Re: city fibre
 

Totally this, combined with the price and crappy upload speeds, why the hell would I pay £40 month for the first 18m then £56 a month for 350/35 from Virgin, when I could pay £40 for life with no annual inflation busting price rises for 1000/1000 on Cityfibre from Zen?

Virgin are absolutely the worst company I have ever dealt with, dealing with Zen since dumping them has been a breath of fresh air. I'm stuck with 80/20 for now but CF should reach me within 12 months (I'm in Ipswich).

Re: city fibre
 

In my experience all large Companies are the same customer service comes second to everything. Obviously I am talking in general, there are some employees who go the extra mile to help people out and believe me I am very grateful to those who do.
I try to use local companies as much as possible as they are far keener to keep customers happy.

Re: city fibre
 

Fat chance, in the short term. I called VM the other day, explaining that I was considering moving to Vodafone/City Fibre. I asked if they might increase my upstream to 100Mb to retain me. The reply was, 'No.' Apparently it is possible on DOCSIS 3.0. All that is required is to set the config to that speed, but I guess the system couldn't support us all getting that speed.

Re: City Fibre
 

Virgin want a national product portfolio and national pricing. Even in Southampton where toob sell 1000/1000 for £25 a month, they are still trying to sell 350/35 for £40 then £56 after 18m.

They wouldn't set up a new config for you. 100mbit up is technically possible with d3.0 but depends on frequency allocations and local infrastructure, remember VM is a hodgepodge of different original builds.

VM won't do regional discounts at all, so they will just bleed customers in fttp towns.

Re: City Fibre
 

The problem for a genuinely national provider is that once they start differentiated pricing it creates a lot of stories of “my mate two streets away pays x” and to be honest as the higher paying customer the fact competition is available elsewhere is unlikely to make them less angry about it.

The best you could hope for is retentions offering deals based on what is available which wouldn’t get the same traction in terms of damage to their reputation.

Re: City Fibre
 

I see why they won't do it, I was just asserting that they won't.

If Cityfibre actually complete all the towns they have planned, they will also be a genuinely national provider.

Re: City Fibre
 

Hopefully alt nets drive coverage and competition.

As you say if one becomes national (or the sum of them does) then it represents competition at a national level.

As Pierre pointed out earlier though as it’s cost prohibitive to deploy the challenge is if there’s someone already there (FTTP or Virgin) and you are fighting over market share from Day 1 it’s often more appealing to go elsewhere.

Re: City Fibre
 

Yeah, you'd definitely think that, yet neither Cityfibre (who are going hard on their deployment), or others like toob in Southampton seem to consider VM competition.

I guess they are planning on significantly undercutting them, with a product that can easily be scaled to XS-GPON and beyond for little additional cost (no need to replace any cables etc, unlike the work VM have to do for node splits).

I mean, 20x the upload for more than 1/3rd less than Gig1, with much better latency than DOCSIS can achieve? Hell, in the case of toob it's £25/m to £64/m from VM. You'd be a fool not to switch.

VM can of course do GPON over their fibre in RFoG areas, it can coexist with DOCSIS, but that raises the "national product" issue again.

That said I've heard that CF are not achieving the level of penetration they hoped for. Personally I think this is at least partly down to lack of hype/advertisement. Most people here in Ipswich don't even know they exist or are rolling out.

Re: City Fibre
 

VM are going to overbuild their HFC network with fibre, and the two networks will operate in tandem. Those happy with what they’re getting can stay on HFC, higher users can transfer to fibre, thereby easing the demands on the HFC. This will start either late this year or early next.

And yes, replacing RFoG with XGPoN is very much in development and will be deployed as soon as.

Re: City Fibre
 

Interesting, I assume you work for VM? This sounds like a long term project that will take a long time to complete, as it's most of the way to deploying a new network, unless VM have a lot of spare duct space, but this is one of those things that probably varies heavily by area, and which cable company built it in the 80s/90s.


I mean it's less in development and more there are already commercial off the shelf solutions for it, it's just WDM which is already used to increase density in RFoG areas, except another frequency for GPON/XGPON.

Re: City Fibre
 

Fibre is smaller than coax, They would probably use the old cable to draw the fibre through

Re: City Fibre
 

Pierre - have VM said anything publicly on overbuild?

Not disputing your posts here - 100% sure you are correct. I'd be quite interested to read more if in public domain just out of curiousity.

Re: City Fibre
 

That works if it's replacement, less so if it's operating in tandem as the guy I replied to suggested. Also doesn't work for direct buried cables, as certainly the last few meters per customer usually are.

Re: City Fibre
 

No, and it's unlikely they will until the build is well underway and dates for releasing areas have been confirmed. Trust me it's happening, I know what the project is called.

Re: City Fibre
 

As I said, wasn’t disputing it will be interesting to read about it when they go public.

Re: City Fibre
 

Interesting.

In my streets in Coventry we have the old NTL network, but a few streets away, where VM previously had nothing, they have installed FTTP as part of their new Coventry South network. VM doesn't offer these customers any products different to what they offer on NTL cable. FTTP hasn't been fully exploited. So, at what point do VM offer a full symmetrical service on their new fibre and on the fibre over-building existing cable? Is the answer to this question more to do with VM's network architecture than fibre or cable?

Re: City Fibre
 

VM's network architecture

Re: City Fibre
 

Because right now they use rfog, which means it's the same docsis system with zero advantages from a customer perspective, although from VM's perspective it's cheaper to maintain, doesn't need power, fibre is cheaper, and the runs can be a lot longer.

They can do gpon and rfog (for TV etc) over the same fibre with wdm, but they don't want to do that yet as they want one range of products nationwide.

Re: City Fibre
 

Sorry ... groupon and frogs and what the what now?

Anyone got a helpful glossary to hand here? This all sounds like it ought to be interesting, if only I could follow it... :D

Re: City Fibre
 

RFoG, Radio Frequency over Glass.

Disappointingly turns an Optical Fibre into a Coax, but without the losses.

It meant that VM could roll out a full fibre network but deliver the exact same services as it’s HFC network (with the exact same limitations) but not need to change any of the back office systems and headend kit.

Because the FTTP network is passive, it doesn’t matter what you put over it. RFoG today, tomorrow XGS-PON. XGS-PON was always the end game and still is.

The HFC will get you to 10G, and probably beyond but it is estimated it will be at end of life between 2035-2040. So a fibre overbuild will be required.

There is a lot of work to be done with the backbone Access network architecture before you get to the delivery.

Re: City Fibre
 

GPON stands for Gigabit Passive Optical Networks. GPON is a point-to-multi point access mechanism. Its main characteristic is the use of passive splitters in the fibre distribution network, enabling one single feeding fibre from the provider's central office to serve multiple homes and small businesses.

Any better now Chris?

Re: City Fibre
 

Others have already done a decent job of explaining but I'll throw my hat in the ring!

HFC or "Hybrid Fibre Coax" is the legacy VM system, whereby you have various "levels" of node, usually powered, with fibre stopping at a certain point and powered distribution amplifiers from that point onwards in the network.

At the end, you have runs from the final node to the customer houses, you'll have a powered distribution amplifier with 1 cable in, a load of coax cables out, some at higher power levels than others. The higher power ports are used for longer coax runs, the very longest coax runs will need higher quality, thicker coax, on the highest power output from the amp.

The equipment in the home from the wallbox is usually passive, and so splits the power between your SH and your TIVO box. If you have multiroom and a load of TIVO boxes, sometimes you'll need a powered splitter in your house. Sometimes there is too much power, and you'll need an attenuator.

Copper Coax cable has, in the same way as any copper cable, an amount of attenuation and loss, and a range of frequencies it is most suited for. Don't forget, all the TV channels are being broadcast at all times on the coax, so if there are 200 TV channels, at 10mbit/s each, then there is 2Gbit/s of TV coming down that cable, in addition to bandwidth for internet.

RFoG, or Radio Frequency Over Glass, literally replaces all the coax (except the 6ft from the wallbox on your house to your SH3.0) with fibre. This means that all the issues of power levels, powered cabinets, etc can (mostly) be removed. There is a powered converter in the wallbox, that the customer supplies power for, that converts the fibre to coax. From the customer perspective, they are using the same signals, the same frequencies, and there is really no advantage to them over HFC (as of today), except perhaps less risk of downtime etc. I've certainly seen evidence of a much lower pre-rs error rate on RFoG installs - although these errors are corrected anyway on the HFC equivalent, it does show the system has more margin of error.

From VM's perspective, RFoG is about future proofing. So far it's been used on new rollouts only, and it's a case of "why would we install coax when fibre has more potential". It also means most of the cabinets can be unpowered, as fibre can be split passively. This saves a fortune, you don't have to get the power company to install cables etc to the nodes etc, but certainly for the customer, it does nothing to solve issues like DOCSIS having a high latency etc. The head end (which was fibre anyway in HFC) doesn't need to change, and the home equipment doesn't need to change.

However, fibre opens up another possibility. If I shine a red light down a fibre, I see a red light at the other end. If I put a prism at each end, and shine a blue light into one side of the prism, a red light in the other, I can split them out again at the other end. This is WDM or "Wavelength Division Multiplexing", using one fibre for multiple signals. This is already actually used in RFoG areas, there are usually 4 "colours", 4 frequencies of DOCSIS used and there will be a colour coded label in the converter in the wallbox on each house showing which frequency it is using.

GPON, Gigabit Passive Optical Network, is the system used by BT Openreach FTTP, and by Cityfibre. This delivers 2.488 Gbits/s download speed, and an upload speed of 1.244 Gbits/s, which can be split between up to 64 users, but in practice split ratios tend to be much lower. I think BT mostly aim for 32:1 but in practice it's usually a bit better than that. I believe Citfibre are aiming for 8:1.

You can see, that at 8:1, if all 8 CF users tried to upload at 1000mbit/sec, they wouldn't be able to, as the network only has 1.2gbit between those people, this is a similar issue to local contention on DOCSIS, but honestly far less likely to occur.

There is then XGPON, which is 10GBit/s down, 2.5GBit/s up, shared between however many users, and XSGPON, (the S standing for Synchronous) with 10GBit/s up and down. Note that, in theory, VM could use WDM as described above to run this over the same fibre cable as RFoG for DOCSIS. Allowing them to use the same TV boxes tuning into the same DOCSIS signals, while also providing far far more bandwidth (yes downstream, but more so upstream) than DOCSIS can offer, but they couldn't do this in HFC areas.

Re: City Fibre
 

Pretty concise.

BTW BT Openreach has never existed as a company. It's just Openreach.