Virgin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

Today whilst delivering political leaflets in South Coventry I noticed two locations in which Virgin were laying new optic fibre along two well-established streets. I asked the contractors if they were laying coax or fibre. "Fibre", they said. The fibre is being laid in shallow pavement trenches with access hatches shared between two houses looking a little different than those currently employed for coax on the old NTL network.
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Is this typical where VM decide to lay cable for existing streets as part of a network extension? I am assuming that each house with the new fibre will be offered fibre to the premises.

Re: Virhin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

Narrow trenching is typical for a percentage of the Project Lightning builds:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php...broadband.html

It's still RFoG Docsis over fibre, so don't get too excited. Terminated into coax at each end. Still sharing the same channels as always. Nothing like GEA FTTP.

Re: Virhin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

So, why are they bothering? They can achieve 300Mb with fibre to the node and coax to the premises. Why bother with fibre along the street unless they are expecting something different going forward.

Re: Virhin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

It's a better investment for areas that are large-ish and not previously cabled, or due to be upgraded because of poor bandwidth / node usage.

It's not much more expensive than coaxial and may even be cheaper.

- No powered line amplifiers requiring an electrical connection, just optical splitters.

- You can run the whole existing cable network as a service over the fibre while simultaneously providing GPON, EPON or XG-PON (10Gbit up and down) over the same fibre.

So, it's ready for the future when there is more data usage, fewer live TV channels, almost everything "video" is streamed and what is today a cable box, in the future runs off an ethernet connection to your fibre termination point and your TV channels are replaced with sections of branded streaming and live content portals in the EPG.

Re: Virhin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

This is known as Fibre Deep Node+0. Node plus zero additional amplifiers, leaving only those in the node.

Which means:
- Reduced power requirements and savings.
- Eliminates the cost of periodically replacing the amps.
- Cuts the expense of maintaining the amps.
- Reduces network failures due to amps.
- Enables extended spectrum and Full-Duplex.
- Everything moving forward requires only changes at the node and headend now, making remote PHY in the future much easier. Each new node may become its own Service Group in the end.

The bonus is that 50% of the new nodes for 4 million homes being FTTP means a hell of a saving on power bills.

Re: Virgin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

Thanks for the explanation. So, it's future proofing, reduction in costs, but no particular improvement in service, contention-wise, that wouldn't have been achieved by a cisco card upgrade and re-segmenting.

From what you imply about an future symmetrical 1Gb service, can I assume that fibre will be put in through all sections of the local network where it isn't already, i.e. head end > node > street box ?

Re: Virgin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

Narrow trenching and FTTP blown fibre is cheaper to deploy than traditional dig both in the access and transit networks. Thats why the majority of build going forward will be FTTP. There will be no product difference between HFC and FTTP areas however, RFoG allows VM to leverage the current broadcast TV and broadband network that it currently uses without starting again with a full PON based architecture.

Long term strategy will have to be FTTLN to delivery Symmetrical Docsis 3.1.

HTH

Re: Virgin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

Does the VM VHUB1 act as a whole hubsite in a box?

I mean - is content archived there by the roadside and played out across the group of nodes it powers, or are hub sites still in (what used to be) the regional headends?

I found it interesting that there were multiple ways of configuring the FTTP network in terms of which street enclosures are used and whether it is a 3 or a 4-level layout.

Back when I used to know how it all worked, I remember it being a simple star topology with each node having a corresponding laser in the hubsite (which used to be the headend).

Re: Virgin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

The VHUB acts as a multiplexer, condensing down up to 3000 subscribers into trunks of 16f back to a headend/hubsite. All CMTS and broadcast equipment is still in the technical sites, the VHUB is just acting like a massive collector node/amplifier.

The star topology you refer to was the ex-Telewest network (point to point PDH generally) while the NTL network is generally built on fibre rings (redundant SDH).

HTH

Re: Virgin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

I'm finding this exchange fascinating and illuminating guys. Thank you.

Of course, as a non-technical punter, I am particularly interested in when Virgin will throw the switch on all this new fibre and give us a symmetrical fibre service. I understand that it is also to do with the kit at nodes and at the VHUB, what is installed and how it is configured. This takes time and cash to modify. However, surely we cannot be far off the dream scenario in those areas that are having coax replaced by fibre.

Re: Virgin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

15-20+ years at a minimum. Docsis 3.1 means that won't be needed for a fair while yet, otherwise the HFC network wouldn't be overbuilt where newer kit is needed (for more RF spectrum)

Re: Virgin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

Interesting stuff. I remember SDH being mentioned now in fact, but being about 15 at the time, those details were lost on me. I guess it's like having a ring main. I did wonder why there were so few lasers compared to nodes in the field.

National network used the ATM protocol, (which I assume is now probably MPLS based).

The Arris (for example) VHub PDFs online mention the use of DWDM feeds - I remember hearing that being spoken about in 1999/2000, as well as discussions about multimode vs single mode fibre. All the stuff in use was single mode I think. I guess this stuff has been converging for years.

Re: Virgin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

Fprward and return lasers are solely for broadcast TV and broadband services, Telco is still provided on either legacy SDH/PDH gateways which have their own laser equipment or the newer Keymile/ECI broadgate gateways which again also act as their own laser/amplifier. The Telephony side of the network and RF distribution are completely different (unless you are lucky enough to live in one of the few digital voice areas).

Re: Virgin Media laying fibre in established VM areas?
 

Well, the "Digital Headend" was newer, larger, telephony oriented and very unmarked. You wouldn't know it was a telephone exchange by looking at it.

The hubsite was less discreet though and had always been the headend for our area for TV, at least. You could see the off-air receiption antennae and dish array from the road. A single 1.2m dish fed a rack of NDS receivers with sky cards in them and the other 15 or so dishes were mostly unused.

I have no idea whether newly built TV and broadband would still originate from the hubsite, or whether it would now be sent out from the newer, totally unmarked building that's not near the hubsite. I would guess it would depend on proximity.