Virgin Media outlines new thinking required once 50Mbps is deployed

Virgin Media has achieved 50Mbps downstream broadband speeds during its DOCSIS 3.0 trial in Kent and has ran into some interesting side-effects of the enhanced service. Kevin Baughan, Director of Technical Strategy at the UK cable operator told the Connected Home conference at this year's IPTV World Forum that most 802.11 WiFi routers in triallist homes could not handle the speeds, not just in wireless mode but even using the wired Ethernet connection. PCs were often configured in such a way that they could not cope with 50Mbps connections either - and had to be reset.

His main point was that ultra-broadband services move the bandwidth bottleneck out of the access network and into the customer premise - and operators offering such speeds need to be ready for the consequences. The Virgin Media trial involved a customer forum where 50Mbps users discussed technical issues and offered criticism and suggestions. Baughan believes this could be a useful model to deploy nationally to coincide with roll-out of DOCSIS 3.0 based broadband.

"We don't want to be called up [at the customer care centre] too often," he pointed out. Referring to the router and PC issues, he said: "There are lots of opportunities for people to complain about the service so as we look at our roadmap, we have to understand that as speeds increase, it is quite demanding to make sure all the pieces in the home can function at those speeds."

Some DOCSIS 3.0 triallists bought better routers to utilise the highest speeds available and the reward was that they enjoyed residential broadband speeds faster than they were used to in their workplace. "50Mbps is not so much about speed but the fact that speed no longer matters for people," Baughan said, summing up the value-add Virgin Media can bring to the UK market with the new technology. "The biggest lesson from the trial is that the access network stops being a constraint. It lets people get on with what they want to do; it doesn't stop people from doing anything any more."

Baughan outlined another important implication of 50Mbps broadband. "It means consumers can access content in our network as quickly as content stored in their home," he explained to delegates.

Baughan said the company now had to decide the best way to exploit these access speeds as an ISP, so that consumers can use the expanded pipe to reach content off the Internet easily. "One option is to bring content much nearer to the edge so the CDN (Content Delivery Network) drops into somewhere locally and we take that local storage and pump it into the access network. That is how we architect VOD today but in the cable paradigm there is a fairly finite library of content available.

"The second option is to put an extremely fast pipe from the CDN to the edge of the network. Unlike big routed networks, we do not have an any-to-any routing problem but an awful lot of content trying to go one way to the customer at the edge, so we could look at fast optical pipes that go straight through the network [from a CDN] to the edge."

Baughan revealed that 9 million homes passed by Virgin Media in the UK will be able to access 50Mbps broadband this year - and 12.5 million by 2009. "This will start to transform the marketplace," he predicted.

Virgin Media is able to offer 50Mbps to the customer premise thanks to a combination of a deep-fibre HFC architecture (fibre to within 500 metres of customer homes) and DOCSIS 3.0 Modular CMTS technology and DOCSIS 3.0 modems. The company has also used the trial to experiment with IPTV over DOCSIS, including the multicast of VOOM HD content in MPEG-4 AVC (encoded at 10Mbps). The new modems have been feeding standard IPTV set-top boxes with Cisco/Scientific Atlanta providing the necessary technologies.