Reply to post: Re: Full fibre?

Re: Full fibre?

So is 'full fibre' the same as 1Gbps? If not, why ot?

If you've got a fibre optic connection, the fibre itself will easily take a gigabit feed. But it doesn't follow that BT or ISPs will have provided gigabit-for-consumers switches and backhaul, nor that the customer premises equipment is gigabit capable. You can argue that putting in gigabit all the way through would be future proofing, but since in population terms domestic users will not stretch even a 300 Mbps connection, why incur the often considerable cost and possibly technology risk of much more expensive equipment? On Vermin Media, they could roll out DOCSIS 3.1 and offer gigiabit speeds very soon - but that would require a D3.1 capable modem, which currently cost two or three times the cost of a cheap D3.0 modem. Commercially it doesn't make sense now. I saw some survey data the other day that indicated less than 3% of VM customers are on 300+ Mbps. Partly that's because not all local nodes are either capable, or have the bandwidth to permit this, partly its because the difference between 100 and 300+ Mbps is virtually invisible in day to day use for most of us. Once you've got to 100 Mbps, far more important are reliability and latency, and most ISPs and network operators have zero focus on those.

And how much will they charge?

As much as they possibly can. Looking at VM pricing, I'd speculate that a gigabit connection would be priced at around £75 a month, and possibly a £100 up front charge. BT won't be too far off that. Hyperoptic is a little bit cheaper, but that reflects that they're mostly building easy-to-serve small networks in new build situations - I suspect that Hyperoptic are still coining it in because they don't really have to market their product, where (for example) Virgin Media waste £300m a year on marketing, and VM probably pay out about half as much again on physical costs of churn.