UPC 400mb speed increase by December 2013 (Not confirmed)

RoyalMarine

Not going to mention names or provide any proof, but I had a discussion with a UPC engineer in my house yesterday.

My modem fried during an ESB outage, and he was replacing it. He did a speed test to ensure it was working fine, and asked why I had only 30mb.
(It's because we have a business line from 2 years ago) and we never upgraded it...

So I said I'll call them tomorrow and upgrade it. He said don't bother, they're increasing speeds up to 400mb by Christmas this year.

Has anyone heard anything about this?

MiskyBoyy

No, but I LIKEY the sound of it!

I'd still upgrade to whatever speed matches what you're currently paying tho.

allen175

might very well be possible, the tech i had out last month to install horizon said that the box is capable of 250mb. so we might see those speeds now since they will want to knock eircom out of the park with broadband speeds, eventhough they are already doing that.

bk

Well the existing DOCSIS 3 modems are capable of 200 - 250mb/s

The DOCSIS 3 standard is capable of 400mb/s, but new modems would likely be required, so I doubt it will be widely available, but perhaps for business customers.

I can certainly see UPC upping their current packages to 100mb, 150mb and 200mb by the end of the year.

I'd rather see UPC focus on improving their upload speeds and bringing down the price of their entry level packages to compete better with Vodafones €35 70/20mb plan.

Paulw

I know a tech in UPC, and they have been running a trial for a while now on 400mb lines. They are in no rush to roll it out, but it is being tested.

I am looking forward to it.

white_westie

Much as the prospect of speed increases sounds great, most people don't have a need for anything like 250Mb+.
I would like to see a better quality rather than quantity of service.
Making available a DOSCIS3 modem only would be one, and enabling bridge mode on all current modem/routers would be another. This would give choice to customers to enable those who need to, make full use of their current/future connection.

RoyalMarine

Paulw wrote: »

I know a tech in UPC, and they have been running a trial for a while now on 400mb lines. They are in no rush to roll it out, but it is being tested.

I am looking forward to it.

He said they have tested 1.5gb with two devices in Dublin recently.

MiskyBoyy

RoyalMarine wrote: »

He said they have tested 1.5gb with two devices in Dublin recently.

Yeah it was September 17th 2012, they posted it on Facebook:

This morning at the Westbury Hotel in Dubin we successfully demonstrated an unparallelled 1.4Gb download speed over a standard home cable. This speed won't be available for a while yet but to give you an idea of how fast it is you could download a 2hr movie in about 30seconds!

lotas

Looking at the DOCSIS page on Wikipedia [1], EuroDOCSIS has a max speed of 50Mb/s per channel. Looking at the modem status of one my my EPC3925s, i see there are 8 down stream channels and 4 upstream [2]. based on the numbers, my guess is that only 5 down and 1 up are being used (Guessing that a dBmV above 0 is a good sign and below is not connected... could be wrong here!). My calculation means that, in theory, there could be a possibility of 400mb/s down and 200mb/s up... Mind you, there is a phone in there somewhere too... so, 64k/s per line may be dedicated to that... possibly less...

anyway, in theory, yes, 400Mb/s could be possible... just my 2 cents...

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS
[2]: http://imgur.com/STBheTc

kaimera

*drool*

prolly won't help much with gaming pings but raw download bandwidth....yes please.

pjproby

a survey by Netflix showed Magnet to be the fastest ISP. Headline speeds are misleading

http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/ireland

bk

pjproby wrote: »

a survey by Netflix showed Magnet to be the fastest ISP. Headline speeds are misleading

http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/ireland

I would seriously question that survey, it certainly isn't what most people experience on the ground.

I think this is more of a reflection that Eircom/Magnet/etc. directly peer with Netflix, while I think UPC peers with them via Holland.

I agree though that UPC should directly peer with Netflix, but I'd take this survey with a pinch of salt.

bk

I can understand that UPC wouldn't rush to 400mb/s, really no need for it. What I'd like see them do is something like:

- 100mb/20mb €35
- 150mb/35mb €45
- 200mb/50mb €55

This would put them far enough out ahead of Eircoms VDSL service to keep them ahead of the game.

Plus improve the quality of their product, a simple modem that can be bridged and peering agreements in Ireland with Netflix, RTE, etc.

ED E

BK is correct, there is no need for them to eat up their increase overhead now when nobody can compete. Wherever its UPC vs DSL they win the majority of customers.

VDSL2 is doing 70 now, wont do 100 for months, and then thats the cap for VDSL2.

Maybe ESB will shake things up, maybe.

lotas

ED E wrote: »

Maybe ESB will shake things up, maybe.

Dont think the ESB Can help much... their business is power, not fiber. they do have the back bone connections, but thats to get around the country. VDSL2 can max out at 200Mb/s both ways, according to Wikipedia:

VDSL2 is an enhancement to very-high-bitrate digital subscriber line (VDSL), Recommendation G.993.1. It permits the transmission of asymmetric and symmetric aggregate data rates up to 200 Mbit/s downstream and upstream on twisted pairs using a bandwidth up to 30 MHz. url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_high_speed_digital_subscriber_line_2[/url

dont know how many modems can take that, and what needs to be done on Eircom's end to get up to that speed though...

Praetorian

I think the increasing of the download rate would be almost pointless because 50 and 100 and 150 is already very good. So much so, when I am at friends places with UPC the bottlenecks are very often on the other end. The web site you are visiting etc.

If they want to upgrade just to have higher numbers than eircom then an
80 entry package, 120 next package and 200 top package would be enough to put eircom in their place.

If the entry package is too good, they will canabalise their own medium and high end packages. Even the greedy bandwidth people will settle for the lower end packages.

An increase on the upload bandwidth is definitely needed now that vdsl has surpassed cable. But surprisingly in plenty of markets, VDSL still has better upload rates than cable. If there is not a technical reason for it, I wonder what it is.

bk

lotas wrote: »

Dont think the ESB Can help much... their business is power, not fiber.

The ESB have put out a tender document looking to build their own Fibre To The Home network, thus they could deliver Fibre broadband direct to peoples homes.

However there hasn't been much news recently, with Eircoms aggressive VDSL rollout, I wonder if it is still happening.

lotas wrote: »

dont know how many modems can take that, and what needs to be done on Eircom's end to get up to that speed though...

In order to hit 200mb/s you need to do vectoring and bond two lines.

Now Eircom is definitely planning to do vectoring and it should be available over the next year, so I would expect them to hit 100mb/s then.

However the line bonding is more complicated. You need tow lines going to each house, which in most cases there already is. And then you need to connect both lines on both the customer side and the cabinet side *

From the reports of the VDSL installs, it seems Eircom aren't connecting the extra line on either the customer side or the cab side. This would indicate Eircom have no short to medium term plan to support line bonding and 200mb/s They would need another engineer visit in order to enable it.

* If you use line bonding, then the VDSL cab can only serve half the number of customers, so that might cause issues with capacity and require a second cab to be installed. This is probably the reason Eircom have no immediate plans to go this way.

I guess in the long term, in urban areas, with high demand and lots of competition from UPC with 400mb/s BB, no point in doing 200mb/s, better to skip it and go straight to Fibre To The Home for those who want high speeds.

Praetorian wrote: »

An increase on the upload bandwidth is definitely needed now that vdsl has surpassed cable. But surprisingly in plenty of markets, VDSL still has better upload rates than cable. If there is not a technical reason for it, I wonder what it is.

Good question, reading about it, there seems to be a bunch of issues that make it harder.

I think the biggest issue is that the cable industry simply wasn't focused on increasing upload speeds, instead focusing just on download speeds. They now have been caught out by this with the growth of cloud computing type services with high upload speed demands.

While the DOCSIS 3 standard supports 4 bonded upstream channels, thus supporting a theoretical 120mb/s upload speed, some of the problems being face by the cable industry are:

- Some DOCSIS 3 modems only support one upstream channel, thus would need to be upgraded.
- Some CMTS are only certified for one upstream channel, thus would need to be upgraded.
- A lot of reconfiguration of ports at the CMTS is needed to support channel bonding.
- Currently most seem to be only using 16 QAM for upstream, versus the 64 or 256 QAM for Downstream. This makes the upload speed slower, notice UPC only offer 10mb/s upstream, despite it theoretically supporting 30mb/s, even without channel bonding. I can only assume this is because they are using slower 16 QAM, perhaps because of backwards compatibility issues with older DOCSIS 1.0 modems.

So while higher upload speeds are certainly possible, it looks like there is a lot of hard work there.

BTW Just reading the DOCSIS docs, given that UPC's modems support 8 downstream channels, 400mb/s downstream should definitely be possible, without them upgrading the customer modems.

But I agree with Praetorian that it is much more important for them to focus on upload speeds and pricing in order to compete with VDSL.

TireeTerror

Praetorian wrote: »

I think the increasing of the download rate would be almost pointless because 50 and 100 and 150 is already very good. So much so, when I am at friends places with UPC the bottlenecks are very often on the other end. The web site you are visiting etc.

If they want to upgrade just to have higher numbers than eircom then an
80 entry package, 120 next package and 200 top package would be enough to put eircom in their place.

If the entry package is too good, they will canabalise their own medium and high end packages. Even the greedy bandwidth people will settle for the lower end packages.

An increase on the upload bandwidth is definitely needed now that vdsl has surpassed cable. But surprisingly in plenty of markets, VDSL still has better upload rates than cable. If there is not a technical reason for it, I wonder what it is.

I dont think it is pointless to have faster speeds. When Im torrenting, I can connect to hundreds of seeders, so the speed would pretty much be as fast as the line can handle. With HD content all the rage, speed is everything. 4K is just around the corner, so that will increase file sizes massively.

gordongekko

Sounds like another excuse to up prices to me.

dub45

gordongekko wrote: »

Sounds like another excuse to up prices to me.

And totally unconnected with unasked for speed increases the previous week!

RoyalMarine

upping prices is worth it when they uip the speeds at the same time.

Jilm

RoyalMarine wrote: »

upping prices is worth it when they uip the speeds at the same time.

That isn't the case for everyone. The entry level product is getting more expensive and some people don't want a speed increase if it comes with a price hike.

I'm on the 30Mbit broadband, I don't want to upgrade to 50Mbit+ as I'll have to ditch the standalone modem for UPC's crap modem/router and sign up to a new 12 month contract.

Now that UPC have announced their "symmetrical bandwidth" business plans surely the consumer packages with faster upload can't be far behind?

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/33749-upc-launches-symmetrical-b

I would like to see the packages suggested by bk earlier in thread implemented.

- 100mb/20mb €35
- 150mb/35mb €45
- 200mb/50mb €55

jmcc

Deleted User wrote: »

Now that UPC have announced their "symmetrical bandwidth" business plans surely the consumer packages with faster upload can't be far behind?

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/33749-upc-launches-symmetrical-b

More technology churnalism from Silirep? The business plans on UPC weren't exactly spectacular and the symmetric bandwidth on those packages isn't great. John Kennedy has had problems distinguishing bytes from bits before so it might make some sense if the bandwidth was being quoted by UPC in bytes and Silirep mangled the press release so that it came out as bits.

Regards...jmcc

Nollog

UPC sent me a survey http://research.ipsosinteractive.com/surveys

Laughed at the 2GB download allowance one they asked me if I'd be interested in.

colm_mcm

/\/ollog wrote: »

UPC sent me a survey http://research.ipsosinteractive.com/surveys

Laughed at the 2GB download allowance one they asked me if I'd be interested in.

That's the limit on the limited sky bb.