Virgin media fibre optic broadband

[danjuma]

Anybody using this, and is there any noticeable better performance than telephone wire based broadband, or is it all a hype?

[jokerjoe]

I was on virgin for years, recently moved to a non-cable area and went with Be. Haven't noticed any difference, latency (on BA) is 16/32 ms which I think it was on virgin.

[PeteB]

It's not hype, but the comparison does depend a lot on where you live - specifically how far from your phone exchange.

Cable broadband (whether fibre-optic or copper) gives you what it says on the tin. Phone line broadband doesn't give you a figure on the tin - it just says "up to" - because you have to be close to your exchange to get the quoted figure. No supplier can work round the physical limitation of the distance from your house to the exchange.

For example, where we are (south east london) we are miles from our exchange, and so it's physically impossible for any phone line broadband supplier to provide us with even just over 1Mbps on services quoted as "up to 8Mbps", whereas with Virgin we reliably get 10Mbps on copper cable. Where we lived before (less than a mile away) we were on a different exchange that was only a quarter of a mile from the house, and we could get close enough to 8Mbps on phone line broadband.

You can test your current service with http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/