Hi Guys, I am just looking for some input really. I am doing a business project as part of my degree (Biomedical Science but dont ask haha) and have to produce a business report on a particular product or service. I have picked Virgin media fibre optic broadband as my product/service. The structure of my report is as follows: * Intro - intro my product, who, benefits etc. * UK Market - the share of the market, competitors etc, * Technical developments - upcoming tech developments that will affect the product, in all aspects, deployment, support, usage etc. * Intellectual Property - the patents/trademarks/copyright around the product and service * Improvement recommendations - 5 recommendations I would give as improvements backed up by the main body. I am happy with completing most of it however I know that everyone here is much more of a fountain of knowledge than I am I am wondering what tech advancements people know of that I can look into to put into my report to discuss areas that will improve or likely be effected by these changes. Also I would like peoples opinions on the improvements I can offer or talk about, what do you see as a feasible improvement that could well be implemented? Thanks guys, as well I thought this might be an interesting discussion topic. Matt
Should look into the roll out of FTTP or FTTH. Get rid of that copper cable running to homes and you have an infinite connection pretty much. If only I had lots of money :/ £7k would buy me a 1gbps fiber line straight to my house. One day... One day... This is also probably worth a read. http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...e_fast_copper_broadband_a_boost?taxonomyId=16
To follow what Votik says, there's a difference between FTTC and FTTH! FTTH is when the fibre optic cable comes right to your house. This allows you much higher speeds. At the moment Virgin "fibre" is actually FTTC - The fibre optics only run to the cabinet in your street, then they have a converter to coax for the last mile, which is EuroDOCSIS. The co-axial cable to your house is left over from the old days of cable TV, so they might as well use it, rather than paying the expense of replacing all the cables! Improvements will come when it's financially viable to replace the coaxial cable with fibre. This will be when the cables get damaged, or if they think they can charge enough for the extra speed. A few other things that will improve performance without replacing the cables: - Caching popular content at the ISP or in the phone exchange. For example, if they can cache the most popular content on iPlayer and youtube, that would free up enough the backhaul network for other, less common, traffic to get better speeds. - Advancements in communications electronics that would allow them to send higher data rates along the copper wires. This is mainly limited by cost and power consumption - in the future when silicon is cheaper and it's easier to make lower-powered chips, they will be able to make better modems for the same price. This is what was explained in Votik's link - Advancements in optics, which is pretty similar to the previous point, but for the fibre optics that make up the backhaul network I hope that's enough to get you started!
For coverage and market development have a look at the thinkbroadband fact sheets- every quater a review of the broadband market- would suggest registering on their forums as theirs some knowledge people on their. http://www.thinkbroadband.com/factsheet/
That's the cost to have it come about 2 miles from the exchange and is a contract for 3 years. But you get 1gbps up and down. Full speed not shared.
