Virgin Media successfully trials 8Gbps broadband

[HEXUS]

Uses existing optical fibre network plus EPON from ARRIS technologies.

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[Unique]

is there SSD's that would let you do as they say, and let you download 20gb in 20 seconds?

i note they say "can" and not "could"

[Ozaron]

Less concerned with whether ~8Gbps is doable, and more concerned with actually getting >150 KB/s.

[yeeeeman]

is there SSD's that would let you do as they say, and let you download 20gb in 20 seconds?

i note they say "can" and not "could"

Fastest SSD can write with 3GB/s, so yeah, it can 20GB in 6.5 seconds.

[Platinum]

is there SSD's that would let you do as they say, and let you download 20gb in 20 seconds?

i note they say "can" and not "could"

Probably not but that's not where this is aimed at, its aimed at households with a large number of people and devices.

[sykobee]

At least these seems like real fibre to the premises, rather than Virgin's fibre to the cabinet + crumbling shared coax to the home.

Still, if it's using a VM router at the end, it's all theoretical numbers, as the wifi will struggle to even penetrate through air, never mind walls.

[Moonister]

Virgin - no thanks. blood sucking, profit by any means, sickening, intrusive and disrespectful marketing strategy + R Branson's egocentric "I know better" face. I'm cool with my 70mb/s BT

[LSG501]

It's all very well have these headline download speeds but what about uploads and I don't just mean our uploads either.

I've been on plenty of sites where their servers can't upload the file to me at a speed that will max out 80Mbps let alone faster, I've even had buffering issues from twitch/youtube even though the nerd stats say everything is fine (still checking why as it's only cropped up after a reinstall with win 10 1809)

So if I'm already needing multiple streams (say 4) to max out my current connection I'll need something like 100x that for 8Gbps... in essence without some major improvements to the underlying infrastructure these speeds are completely useless.

[will19565]

Virgin - no thanks. blood sucking, profit by any means, sickening, intrusive and disrespectful marketing strategy + R Branson's egocentric "I know better" face. I'm cool with my 70mb/s BT

i hate BT, we used to have about 2.5mbit/s, then something went wrong and we dropped to about 0.5mbit/s, called BT out many times each time they said nothing was wrong, we switched providers, they activated a new line for us and the internet speed went back up to its previous speed.

[Tabbykatze]

BT are the bloodsuckers? Must have missed that memo, orobably came across a BT network that was shaped and controlled to within an inch of its life...

[Ferral]

Its all well and good putting money into increased speed round London etc but really they should be extending their network into Sky only (Open Reach) areas like a lot of County Durham. Round here you have Gateshead, Sunderland and Durham City with a huge gap round Chester Le St and surrounding areas. Some places are only getting around 12Mbps on Fiber which is a joke for streaming services especially with a few people using it in a household.

[watercooled]

Why are broadband technology demos always met with the same negative comments? Of course it's not a rollout - it's a forward looking test to test things like feasibility, costing, etc well in advance of a planned rollout.

We're still some way off having >1Gbit network interfaces on computers so it would take 8 of those to come close to maxing an 8Gbit subscription! Not to mention plenty of servers won't be designed to handle that sort of speed to a single user just yet.

WRT to the criticism of Virgin's coax network - it's a substantial asset and capable of plenty more speed before they need to worry about FTTP. DOCSIS 3.1 will allow for far great upload speeds vs the current limitations too, whether Virgin choose to exploit that possibility to its full extent is their decision, but don't be surprised if they don't end up providing the headline 'symmetrical' speed, firstly because it's a bit of a waste provisioning that much RF bandwidth for domestic connections, and secondly because it's likely to eat into leased line subscriptions for businesses who want the speed but care less about SLA.

In fact AFAIK this demo is still using DOCSIS and terminating in a cable modem over coax, but using their FTTP RFoG architecture.

[DerbyDave]

Its all well and good putting money into increased speed round London etc but really they should be extending their network into Sky only (Open Reach) areas like.................

why would Virgin let Sky use their network?

[darcotech]

So, are they are preparing for that new 8K/VR Netflix subscription?

Amazon will follow with GrandTour I am sure.

Just the hope that new 8K TVs have at least 10Gb LAN port.

[Ferral]

@DerbyDave

I never implied that, my point is that a lot of County Durham is an Open Reach area with only BT & Sky etc available through the fiber network that still partly uses the old copper cable that BT installed back when.

It's about time Virgin extended their network and services into the areas with poor coverage with the Open Reach offering. Not for Sky etc to be using the Virgin network but for people to be able to get the Virgin Broadband and TV services.

[raygdunn]

I wonder what contention ratio they would use on a connection like that.

Will presumably need a related speed increase in the internet backbone to support it. Just moves the bottleneck.

My sister on a farm in mid Devon still only gets about 0.5M (and no mobile signal) and no signs of fibre to the cabinet! We are on a small country exchange on the Welsh border, I was amazed when we received that upgrade a couple of years back.

"Red Dead Redemption 2 (99GB download)"
I'm still staggered by making 40Gb game downloads.