JamesAC said:
Thanks for that. My local exchange is scheduled for 2011. However, the Virgin website said that my area WAS fiber-optic ready. Are these tow different systems?
Yes. Two different systems, two different companies. Some similarities of course.
Virgin Media is the merged company of telewest and ntl, which the latter used to be cable & wireless as well. In the 1990s these were many different cable franchises and they were putting fibre optics in the ground between circa 1993-1999 and started to use fibre optics for broadband properly around the year 2000. Through mergers and putting in the fibre the company now has £6 billion of debt, so basically no more cable - ever. Well that's not quite true they do connect up a small number of new builds every year. The problem is that people have this odd idea that US style cable is 'coming to town' and they'll cable every street one day. It's nothing like that, the coverage maps are patchy and complicated so people get baffled when they move from one house to another round the corner and bitterly complain about it not being cabled - it happened to some friends of mine in london even though I did warn them. You have to check your exact postcode has cable and even then that might be wrong because there are a few errors and so on. If a neighbour has a green box on the side of their house, it's probably a cabled area though. Very crudely around 60% of the population is cabled. Their system is closed an only used by virgin. One day this may change but as BT are cabling similar areas this seems fairly pointless.
BT's system is totally different. It's about dragging bits of the system up to a higher standard so people can get 40Mbs off ADSL. Eventually FTTx will get upto 40%. This will be very beneficial to urbanites who live further from the exchange as instead of typical such speeds of 3-5Mbs they'll be able to get much faster. You won't have to buy it off BT if your exchange is done because the services will be rolled out to other providers. So if Zen is LLUed off your exchange (it isn't) then supposedly you'd be able to get these higher speeds with them, so there'd be benefits for other ISPs. Anyway there's not been much media coverage about any of this stuff but it'll be an extremely big deal for a lot of urban people. There will also be some very cheesed off people when they find they are excluded from it too.
