ARRIS Works with Virgin Media to Field Multi-gigabit Broadband Trial in UK

ARRIS has announced that it has been doing with Virgin Media in the U.K. to successfully trial very high-speed multi-gigabit broadband connections to residential consumers.

With the announcement, Virgin extends their global leadership — their trial includes 50 residences with speeds of 8.5 Gigabits per second (Gbps)! ARRIS engineers played an integral role in realizing this announcement:

To enable this, ARRIS has created a passive optical network approach that achieves these unprecedented speeds with minimal additional costs or investments. By provisioning DOCSIS over an Ethernet passive optical network, Virgin Media could use their existing radio-frequency-over-glass equipment and simply overlay the new capabilities. That’s a huge cost and investment saving and achieves progress with minimal disruption.

ARRIS has helped Virgin go from installation to live service for its first subscribers in just 12 weeks. ARRIS provided the network design concept, project plan, and sent an expert support team. This really emphasizes the flexibility and latent capability of the existing Fiber and DOCSIS networks.

ARRIS has also helped regulators in the U.K. accurately measure the network’s symmetrical performance. This new network is so fast, the firm benchmarking these new networks for the country’s Ofcom regulator had to create an entirely new tool to work at these speeds. That’s a great problem to have, for sure.