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Comment by Rjevski | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure it's actually fibre? Or is it their bullshit coax cable (HFC) they mis-sell as "fibre"?

It's a bit weird that there hasn't been a decision about the mis-selling of "fibre" connections in the UK. Virgin's network is pretty great if you're not in an oversubscribed area, but it just seems weird to bill it as "fiber".

To be fair though, DOCSIS 3.1 can push 10GB through coax so it's not all bad.

Yeah, so it's not fibre, and should not be sold as such. Not saying HFC is bad (it's actually an awesome way of reusing a deprecated cable TV network), but it's not fibre.

HFC for example is a shared medium across the entire neighbourhood, and in fact if you get root access on your modem and run tcpdump on the HFC interface you may see everyone else's packets as well - there's optional encryption built into DOCSIS but I've never seen it enabled.

The ASA has made the decision to allow it.

It's annoying that we defer to them...

AT&T does that a lot around here... every 6 months they knock at my door saying that they have been improving the network and sell it as fiber but the fiber only goes to a main box in your neighborhood, and copper goes to your house (it's probably been the same for the last 10 years)... but to tell you the truth, I don't care if it's fiber, only the actual speed matters (with AT&T it is not very fast).

I could get 2000mbps with Comcast and can only get 25mbps with AT&T...

It’s definitley fibre and we get a stable 100Mbit connection all the time.

Sorry, but it's definitely not fibre. I know they told you it is, but it isn't. They're using the old cable TV network. It's a coaxial protocol called DOCSIS.

Like BT, Virgin Media is fibre to the cabinet and then copper for the last mile. It's just that the coaxial copper and the DOCSIS protocol used by Virgin do a better job at speed than the twisted pair copper and the VDSL protocol used by BT.

It's going to be very interesting to see how they advertise real fibre to the public when it arrives, if even on Hacker News there's confusion about it.

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