Why is it that Virgin can offer Gigabit Broadband at my address, but Sky can only offer 39 Mb/s

[LesDragon]

I find my Broadband Speed extremely frustrating.

I lived in a small village just 6 miles away and had a broadband speed of 80 Mb/s download, 39 Mb/s upload. I was over 400 m from the nearest fibre hub, andrunning on a telephone line that was at least 40 years old.

I have moved to a small town on an estate built 40 years ago which had fibre installed 30 years ago. My broadband speed here is 39 Mb/s download and 6.5 Mb/s upload.

I have approximately 750 Gbytes of data in the cloud. When I had to replace my computer, it took more than 2 days to download and synchronise.

Uploading 50 Gbytes of photographs after a shoot takes 20 hours.

Virgin offer Gigabit speed at the same address. 30x faster. Why can't Sky offer the same.

[cookiemonsteruk]

@LesDragon 

Virgin run a different network using high grade co axial cable and free to decide where and when to put their infrastructure

If you enter your full postal address below and post the table after removing you address we can look at whats available via openreach

https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com/#/ADSL/AddressHome

[TimmyBGood]

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@LesDragon wrote:

I lived in a small village just 6 miles away and had a broadband speed of 80 Mb/s download, 39 Mb/s upload. I was over 400 m from the nearest fibre hub, andrunning on a telephone line that was at least 40 years old.

I have moved to a small town on an estate built 40 years ago which had fibre installed 30 years ago. My broadband speed here is 39 Mb/s download and 6.5 Mb/s upload.

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Fibre To The Cabinet  has a very specific, fixed and predictable speed vs distance curve which is inherent to the technology and results from signal attenuation over the metallic portion of the circuit, as illustrated below.

In addition, having a 39Mbs inbound speed typically indicates either provisioning on 40/10 rather than 80/20 due to line characteristics ('handback speed') or the intervention of automated Openreach DLM as a result of signal instability.  It's very unlikely you had 39Mbs upload previously as that's not physically possible on FTTC: 80Mbs in and 20Mbs out is the best it can be, out to about 250 metres from the cabinet (excepting the use of experimental technology never deployed as standard).

As @cookiemonsteruk indicates, no ISP can offer anything close to gigabit over a 'phone line': that's just a matter of physics.  Virgin achieves its headline speeds by using its own private coaxial cable network with very local distribution nodes, while anything over 300Mbs 'Ultrafast' from all other ISPs is over optical fibre all the way to the subscription address, so bypassing the losses over copper that cripples FTTC (for 300Mbs and below, G.fast over very short copper runs to a fibre node is viable).  If your current estate 'had fibre installed 30 years ago' then I don't know what that would have been: Openreach FTTC dates from 2008 at the earliest.

Oh, and almost all domestic broadband (apart from some of the new dedicated full-fibre ISPs) is inherently hugely asymetric: on a nominally gigabit service the outbound speed will be 100Mbs at most (and actually considerably slower on Virgin than Openreach ISPs).  Faster outbound typically requires business-level provision: a gigabit symetrical 'leased line' over Openreach fibre for example will set you back several hundred pounds a month.