PJCNET

BT Infinity and Virgin Media’s Super Fast Cable Services
…and even faster super fast cable services in the near future!

At the time of writing in April 2010, BT have recently launched a brand new super fast Internet service named BT Infinity and they have invested Billions of pounds into this mainly fibre optic service. BT Infinity is BT’s answer to complete with Virgin Media’s super fast 50Mb/S cable broadband service. The new BT service will operate in a similar way to Virgin Media’s cable services where street level boxes will be connected directly to high speed optical fibre internet lines (please also see * below) instead of from local telephone exchanges to initially provide up to a 40Mb/S service. Using street level boxes dramatically reduces the distance of copper line required for each home connection and improving the communication technology from ADSL Max or ADSL2+ to VDSL (Very high bit rate Digital Subscriber Line) takes full advantage of the improved line quality. Because BT can’t quite compete with Virgin’s 50Mb/S maximum download speed, BT are instead offering by far the fastest upstream available to households in the UK at up to 10Mb/S which will allow a lot more high speed interactivity. This upstream speed is around 6 times faster than Virgin Media’s super fast service.

Unfortunately existing and often very old copper BT phone lines will still be used to connect from the customer’s home to the street level boxes, although this distance will usually be much shorter than to the nearest BT telephone exchange, so the overall line quality and potential speed will be greatly improved, especially if you happen to live a long way from your local BT telephone exchange. The new service is currently only available to a select few customers at the time of writing, but BT intend to fully expand this service to most of the UK over the next couple of years. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the new technology used is called VDSL (Very High Bit Rate Digital Subscriber Line) which supersedes ADSL2+ (Up to 20Mb/S or 24Mb/S) which superseded ADSL Max (Up to 8Mb/S) although a few ISPs did use ADSL2 in between (Up to 12Mb/S). For VDSL to show much improvement over ADSL2+ it’s important to exclusively use fibre optic cables or only very short distances of copper lines if copper can’t be completely.

BT have still got to go a long way to catch up Virgin Media who are already offering up to a 50Mb/S download service to Millions of customers in the UK and most customers actually achieve speeds close to the maximum limit, plus Virgin is already testing their new 100Mb/S service which is being rolled out to new and existing customers over the next year or so and there’s definite plans for a 200Mb/S service after that. In fact Virgin Media’s optical fibre cable network could eventually support speeds as fast a 1Gb/S in future (roughly 1000Mb/S). South Korea are well currently ahead of the UK and top the world when it comes to Internet speeds where 1GB/S maximum speeds are expected as soon as 2012 using even later VDSL2 technologies.

* There’s currently an ongoing argument between Virgin Media and their arch rivals BT as Virgin claim that BT Infinity network still won’t be fully fibre optic as they imply. They won’t only still have old copper lines connecting from the customer’s home to their nearest street level box, but the connection from the street level box to some local telephone exchanges might also include some old copper wiring for sometime to come, this means that some customer’s on BT Infinity could still be slowed down significantly depending on their distance to the local telephone exchange and therefore they still won’t get close to the maximum 40Mb/S download speed. Virgin Media also use some copper lines that run from the customer’s home to street level boxes, but their copper lines are usually newer and the connection to the Internet from Virgin’s street level boxes are 100% super fast optical fibre, this means that most customer’s can realistically connect close to the maximum 50Mb/S speed no matter where they live on the Virgin network.

Offering a much faster 10Mb/S upload speed is a good added bonus for BT Infinity that will appeal to some, but faster download speeds are more important than faster upload speeds for the majority of customers. BT Infinity would be much better however for people who regularly upload large amounts of multimedia files and the service is in my opinion the first affordable UK home Internet service with feasibly fast enough upload speeds to run a small web server, before this only a massively expensive dedicating line would have been good fast enough.

I doubt if BT will be allowed by OFCOM to be the only provider allowed to use their new super fast network for long, so I would expect rival LLU equivalent services to eventually emerge who will also be providing similar super fast 40Mb/S services or faster in the future.

Remember that there’s various other factors that can effect the speed of your broadband connection other than the raw connection speed. Please watch this space for a link to a new article describing these factors in detail.

Please click to share this article!