[Quarrel]

He claims:

> One peculiar thing from the UK: Internet providers don’t truly offer gigabit internet.

Which might well be true where he is (ie he's limited to the equivalent of shared HFC or xDSL), but certainly isn't true everywhere.

I've had gigabit fibre (full duplex) in London since 2016, and the building had it before I arrived. It also has incredibly low latency to the major data centres of London, and not a lot more to most of western Europe.

[iamcalledrob]

Symnetric gigabit connections can be hard to come by in London.

If you're served by a niche fibre provider (e.g. Hyperoptic, Community Fibre) then you're golden.

There's Virgin (think Comcast) with paltry upload speeds due to the cable tech. Understandable though not ideal.

Then there's the OpenReach full fibre network with paltry upload speeds due to... ??? there appears to no good reason, other than not wanting to cannibalise their leased line business. Does anyone actually know why they don't offer a symmetric product like the niche fibre ISPs?

[martinald]

Virgin actually have upgraded a huge swath of their footprint from cable to XGS-PON (probably coming up to 10million homes now, with the full program due to finish in a couple of years).

However, due to their comically bad billing systems (i believe they licensed a billing system off the cable modem headend provider) they do not allow their existing users to switch from DOCSIS cable to FTTH. This has been a problem for a couple of years now. They've spent billions on civil engineering work to blow fibre everywhere but existing customers can't order it because their billing system is tightly coupled to their cable modem system. They offer up to 2gig symmetrical over XGSPON FTTH.

Re openreach I think it's a bit of protecting leased line revenue, a bit of faster upload speeds actually being quite niche - the market is driven by headline download speeds - but most importantly they rolled out GPON not XGSPON.

GPON "only" has 2.5gbit/1.2gbit available to the entire network slice it's on, which can be up to 32 homes (theoretically many more but openreach have that as the maximum I've seen).

This means one gigabit uplink can nearly saturate the entire link for the network slice of 32 homes.

They do have plans to upgrade to XGSPON (though I suspect they may skip that and move to 50GPON instead). XGSPON has 10git/10gbit and 50GPON 50/50 available to the same 32 homes.

They are just about to start a pilot of XGSPON in Guildford which has up to 8gig symmetrical available.

It's not a huge amount of work to upgrade PON versions, it just requires new line cards, and new ONT boxes for each house and can run side by side with existing GPON.

[lonesword]

Hyperoptic is niche? I thought they were available all over London.

[mprovost]

Even if they are available on your street, each building and individual flat has to be connected. For blocks of flats that's not always straightforward.

[iamcalledrob]

Not where I am. It's street by street. A lot of areas have no fibre at all, not even OpenReach.

It's cable from Virgin or DSL

[user5994461]

> Does anyone actually know why they don't offer a symmetric product like the niche fibre ISPs?

Short version: The UK regulator OFCOM defines ultrafast internet as 30 Mbps download speed. That's why UK internet providers (openreach and related) have deals starting as low as 30 Mbps and they can't be arsed to provide a faster speed (unless you pay £££).

[timthorn]

It's possibly because of a ruling from the Advertising Standards Authority back in the ADSL days: https://www.asa.org.uk/resource/broadband-speed-claims-guida...

[user5994461]

Full quote. The problem is the price.

> One peculiar thing from the UK: Internet providers don’t truly offer gigabit internet. They have a range of deals like 30 Mbps – 75 Mbps – 150 Mbps – 300 Mbps – 500 Mbps – 900 Mbps, each one costing a few more pounds per month than the last.

Gigabit is so much more expensive (obviously it's gone down a lot). In London 2016, I had ADSL broadband at 16 Mbps for £12/month. That building didn't have fiber at the time. When fiber finally happened... it started as 30 Mbps fiber for so much more money.

[sudhirb]

I have 150Mb/s FTTP for £37/month - upgrading to gigabit would be £75/month, for example!

[Latty]

This is actually something where you are often better off outside of cities. The areas serviced by newer providers who are using the government grants to offer fibre to places without it and are actually running new fibre tend to offer much better prices and speeds.

E.g: One of them offers 900Mbps symmetric for £40/month (with a deal for £30/month for the first year). Meanwhile the legacy providers via OpenReach will only give you 700 down/100 up for more money, and require a two year contract.

The only real downside is most of them will CGNAT you, but most do offer IPv6 too, and mine offers a static IPv4 for £5/month more.

[regularfry]

Fibre rollout in London was (is?) really, really patchy. If your building had it you were lucky. If you hadn't had it already you may well have found it impossible to get at retail.

[martinald]

It's actually very well covered now. The problem is apartment buildings. The buildings owner has to give approval to allow openreach/virgin/hyperopic to run new fibre thru the building, and it's extremely time consuming for network providers to negotiate these individually per building.

If you're not in an apartment building you'll almost certainly have FTTH coverage from someone in London.

The govt is consulting on new laws which would give apartment building residents the power to demand the freeholder of the apartment building allow fibre installs, which would make this far easier.