If you have a 5G-enabled phone, to state the obvious, test it with that first. You may also find that by a window means you still get coverage inside even if the coverage is supposedly outdoor-only. There are external antennas you can buy and fit to your house if you really want to optimise your coverage but that is unlikely to be necessary in your situation. In my experience, coverage checkers tend to be pessimistic and you often actually can receive good coverage where it isn’t predicted. For more on external antennas, have a look at the ispreview.co.uk forums.
I agree with @N26Throwaway that your best bet in the short term is probably to stay with Virgin Media (and maybe switch your mobile to O2, if you’d consider that, to get a good package deal in order to reduce overall cost). Speak to their retentions and threaten to leave, quote the cheapest FTTC price you can find and ask them to match it. If they won’t budge, then I’d look into 5G. 5G would be a decent stopgap if you think fibre is coming but be aware that it often takes around a year from work starting to actually being able to order when a new fibre network is being rolled out.
Maybe as an easy way to check the capability of your Openreach line, although it’s actually easier just to put your phone number or address into the Openreach wholesale checker below which gives far more information:
It’s also important to note that Openreach and Sam Knows won’t show you build plans for altnets, which won’t necessarily be based at all on Openreach exchanges, so looking up exchnages can be misleading. bidb.uk gives the best consolidated checker I have ever found but even then you do have to follow up manually with each company it identifies as a possible option.
Do you mean from when work starts in my street or work starting in my area?
There are properties less than a mile from me using Community Fibre (based on bidb).
I meant work starting in your area, although it’s highly variable!
Generally, if they have properties close by it shouldn’t take too long - but if they need to site a new cabinet they may be held up by planning processes or connecting power or backhaul infrastructure to it; if they need to close roads to complete work that requires a Temporary Traffic Regulation Order which takes 3 months to be approved.
It sounds like you should expect less than 6 months if they are already close and active in building the network, but that’s assuming they continue building it in the vicinity and don’t “jump” to another area before coming back later which they may well do if they get permissions they’ve been waiting for there.
Yes, it’s not actually FTTP, they use coaxial cables (copper) for the connection to your home rather than fibre cables. Specifically the use the propriety protocol DOCSIS 3.1.
Community Fibre and Hyperoptic provide true FTTP - as in actually running a fibre optic cable all the way to your house. It’s a lot faster especially on the upload.
Virgin Media actually currently run two networks. One is based on Hybrid-Fibre Coaxial, using DOCSIS as you say. The other (mostly in new-build areas where they’ve recently expanded) is real FTTP and their ambition is to upgrade and replace the HFC network with a full-fibre one everywhere, but this will take time.
Presumably once that is done it will be possible for all their customers to get symmetrical speeds, although the protocols used even in FTTP can mean speeds aren’t symmetrical. Openreach, for example, use GPON based technology which can mean that the active node (Openreach Handover Point) where your fibre terminates and connects to the backhaul network is many miles away and serves hundreds of properties. As such, there is some element of network contention and the protocol does prioritise download over upload - so Openreach sell their service in speed tiers where the download speed is faster than the upload.
Makes hella difference when your ps5 decides to update games every time you go on we are 350/30.
As for actual usage we most likely wouldn’t know the difference until both online gaming then probably need a good stable 30-50meg easy to cover any impact to each other (different games with different people).
Anarchist
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If your free broadband is good enough, there’s no reason for you to upgrade.
My broadband keeps cutting off (for about a minute, multiple times a day), but it’s cheap (and will be free for a couple of years soon), so I use 4G for most browsing and some streaming.
As others have said, in many ways true Gigabit connectivity is future-proofing and not necessarily needed today. However, not everyone has the luxury of even Fibre to the Cabinet. So my only option here is poor signal, unreliable 4G which would be about 15Mb/s on a good day, or ADSL at around 6.5Mb/s on a good day. They are both too slow and both prone to dropouts and problems with connection reliability, so quite useless. FTTP is being built in the village right now so hopefully we will be able to order and gain a massive speed increase soon!
Depending on distance to the cabinet, FTTC can also be quite slow and may not work well enough for a household with multiple people and devices. Upload speed, especially, is often too low for multiple people to be seamlessly working from home with online meetings - for example.
All these speed tests are making me very impatient for my own FTTP to become live for orders! They’ve already completed the roadworks, so the hard part is done, but somehow being so close and still not having it yet is even more annoying!
Yes but only because there’s three people in the flat and all can be heavy internet users. Esp. as any one of us can be on work video calls at any time*, those might not need much in theory but you definitely notice if it’s not running at 100%. We had 80/10 (I think?) before and definitely noticed that all lag dissapeared and voice and video improved when we moved to 1gbs symmetrical.
We definitely don’t need 1gbs either, it’s just that it was like £20 for 100mbs, £30 for 500 and then £35 for 1gbs and it felt like ‘why not’. Steam downloads at crazy speeds are also a boon but I could live without them. Also I stream games sometimes, for that it really helps.
per device we probably rarely if ever use more than 20mbs
*edit: goes downstairs and sees partner on zoom work meeting (muted), streaming in 4K on the TV, playing hearthstone on the iPad and with their phone set up on a little stand to keep up to date with social media. Yeah I think I can see where this bandwidth is going
Yeah it really depends on what you’re doing. I was previously getting 35ish Mbps, it was fine and coped comfortably with multiple video calls, people streaming TV at the same time, etc.
I’ve just moved to a new place with FTTP and I’m paying for 150Mbps.
In all honesty, day to day it’s exactly the same. The only real difference is that I occasionally have to push around very large audio files for work. It’s much faster now, but previously I would have just let it run in the background and made a tea or flicked through this forum or something. I guess my employer is getting a more productive employee out of this.
We have around 40 devices on our network. The total speed makes a huge difference when I’m trying to work, kids are watching YouTube, Mrs is listening to podcasts and our cameras and smart speakers are all constantly using background data.
Even things like printers are constantly installing software updates these days and if you really need 100% of your connection that can slow you down. The modern world basically demands that you have more bandwidth available than you think you will ever need, in case other things use it in the background!
We’ve had a fibre cable literally dangling in front of our house for 6 months now, suspended ‘temporarily’ between the 2 older phone poles above ground so no-one can nick it. It’s the same all over the area (which won a funding grant from the Government to use Openreach to install FTTP in the area) Cable runs placed underground, nicely tarmac’d over, cable pulls ready to go, cables hanging - just get the cables into the runs, pull 'em through and connect at either end. Simples.
But you know, Openreach and Government contracts. Time-to-go-live =
we are 350/30.
