Our listings have gained another XGS-PON option, this time its Lightning Fibre with a 2.5 Gbps service priced at £99/m with a £100 setup fee on a 24 month contract.
The package speeds are listed at 2000 Mbps download and 2000 Mbps upload, since providers are meant to be able to demonstrate that the average speed at peak times across a range of customers on a product are delivering those speeds.
We have changed our ONTs to The Adtran SDX 631 XGS-PON ONT to provide a smaller footprint device which is more power efficient. We have also rolled out new Routers, the Zyxel EX5601, which is 2.5G ready to satisfy subscribers’ bandwidth-intensive needs with optimized bandwidth utilization. Beamforming technologies deliver optimal WiFi experiences and addresses issues with dead zones.
Paul Thornton, chief technology officer at Lightning Fibre
With advent of USB-C connectors on laptops and PC hardwiring to make the most of XGS-PON is not particularly expensive these days, but no doubt there just like Gigabit Ethernet was rare in the consumer hardware arena there will be variations in how different adaptors perform.
Gigabit speeds is overkill for the vast majority of people, but if you live in a household with multiple doing data intensive tasks, e.g. gaming using cloud services, twitch streaming, or just several people who want to ensure that their gaming experience is not messed up by someone in another room switching on their console and downloading a large map pack then Gigabit and possible faster may be seen as worthwhile. £99/m will seem excessive for broadband, but if splitting the bill between 3 or 4 adults it is not that mad.
Lightning Fibre is not done with launches, they are planning to launch their own brand VoIP service in January, with a PAYG option starting at £6/m with 10p per minute calls, or £14/m flat-rate package which includes calls to UK landlines and mobiles. Of course no real reason that you cannot use any of the VoIP retailers that exist today and if you have low latency high bandwidth full-fibre you can configure the call quality to the max.
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As been said on the preview to this article, it is all about bragging rights, as I doubt that many people will bother with 2.5Gb/s, for a start to get the best out of it the internal network will need to cope with that.
Some people will know how to use it, and those people will surely have an internal network that can cope with that throughput. However, many most likely won’t and there will certainly be a few at least who just want it for the sake of bragging about it. I don’t imagine that there will be a significant take up at the moment but it’s there if someone feels that they need it, or simply wants to brag about it.
For households with many people sharing the connection, which download/upload a lot, this could be quite useful even if most of their devices are currently 1 gigabit to the Zyxel router.