Fiber arrives 10 times faster and at a knockdown price: Is it worth hiring it?

Digi, the operator that can be hired from businesses as varied as phone booths or butchers, surprised locals and strangers when last Wednesday it unveiled the first 10 Gbps fiber rate for residential users in Spain. Not only because it is 10 times faster than the existing connections until now, but also because of its price: 30 euros per month, what they pay today for a sad ADSL (up to 20 Mbps) in areas where they do not fiber arrives.

Digi’s new offer is now available for hiring, but to start deflating this balloon you don’t have to go too deep, you just have to talk about its (scant) coverage. The Romanian operator uses Movistar’s fiber throughout Spain, but its best offers, this new one and the one that offers 1 Gbps for 20 euros per month, are limited to areas with Digi’s own fiber coverage. This coverage reaches populations (or neighborhoods of these) in 11 provinces, but fiber at 10 Gbps for the moment can only be contracted in certain areas of the Community of Madrid.

Beyond the coverage, which will grow, but will continue to be very limited, it is not exactly 10 Gbps, but “up to 10 Gbps”, although it is not far off. According to the operator the actual maximum speed that can be achieved will be 8 Gbps, since part is reserved for “connectivity between computers”. In the tests that Digi headquarters did in the presentation, they reached 7,885 Mbps downstream and 5,639 Mbps upstream connected by cable, while via WiFi, the result was about 1,500 Mbps in both directions. Latency should also be mentioned: 0 milliseconds over cable and 8 milliseconds over wireless.

Why so much?

Digi’s offering is certainly attractive, although geographically very limited, but there are several barriers to overcome in order to take advantage of it, if possible. First of all, the router provided by Digi only has a wired connection capable of offering up to 10 Gbps, while the other four ports are limited to 1 Gbps. Equally, not many computersdesktop or portable, and USB-C to network cable adapters can pass 1 Gbps. Digi has not detailed the maximum that its router can offer over WiFi, although it also depends on having WiFi 6 compatible devices, which are also in short supply right now.

Anyway, do we need 10 Gbps connections? Maybe a company, depending on the use it makes of the connection, yes, but a home is hardly going to get performance at those 10 Gbps, and not even at a 1 Gbps connection, no matter how many members the family has. For example, to watch a series or movie on Netflix at the highest quality a connection of 25 Mbps. There may be several simultaneously pulling the same connection, but a connection with 300 or 600 Mbps could be more than enough.

The improvement covered by the 10 Gbps is in the latency of the connection

That 10 Gbps are not necessary today (surely they will be in the future) does not detract from Digi’s offer, because in addition to being fast, it is especially cheap. But if there is something really interesting and what can already be taken advantage of in the new offer of the Romanian operator is the improved connection latency. The time it takes for our stocks to reach the internet, that delay that can ruin video calls or online games, is about 10 milliseconds with current fiber connections with the GPON standard, while with Digi’s fiber, which uses the XGS standard. -PON, it is reduced to around 1 millisecond.

Will it reach other operators?

More than one might ask, how, being Digi a “small” operator compared to Movistar, Orange and Vodafone, can it offer fiber at 10 Gbps before them? The truth is that there is a lot of marketing in Digi’s announcement, like when Yoigo was the first operator to announce the deployment of 4G back in 2013, to end up being advanced by Orange and Vodafone. Or as is happening with 5G and the traps to have more coverage. And it is that the vast majority of coverage queries on Digi’s website will give negative results when consulting the availability of fiber at 10 Gbps, because does not even reach many areas of the capital.

Digi will be the first operator to offer 10 Gbps, but you won’t be alone in a matter of months, because they have all been pilots for years and are preparing for their massive deployment. Movistar announced in its latest results that it was working on updating its fiber network to the XGS-PON standard that allows offering those 10 Gbps, with the forecast of commercializing that speed from the first half of 2022. Orange is on the same path , which before the end of the year will update its network in five cities (we do not know which ones) to proceed to a massive update next year.

The MásMóvil Group already has fiber capable of offering 10 Gbps, although it is not yet in its offer or in all of Spain. These are Euskaltel fiber, R and telecable, brands that were (and continue) making the leap from cable to fiber with XGS-PON when they were bought by MásMóvil. At the moment all of them offer a maximum of 500 Mbps to residential customers, but they could jump up to 10 Gbps at any time. Vodafone remains in the queue, which despite having also carried out its tests has not transmitted plans to update its network to XGS-PON. Likewise, with its current fiber it could reach up to 2.5 Gbps and through agreements with other operators it would reach the famous 10 Gbps.

Both Movistar and Orange and MásMóvil have in their plans to short the fiber at 10 Gbps

Alliances, in the form of joint deployments and access to third-party networks, will play an important role in the jump to 10 Gbps, which will be joined by new guests: FiberCo. These companies have networks that they rent to operators, who are making them grow at aging steps, selling parts of their networks to them. MásMóvil has already done it, which transferred a network to Onivia that reaches 1.1 million homes, and the movements will continue to occur in the near future. The impact on end users is that smaller brands will be able to compete more easily with the big ones, by having a new option to offer their services.

What all the sources in the sector consulted agree on is that digi’s movement, beyond the headlines, has a lot of marketing. Not because the usefulness of 10 Gbps today is limited (although at the price you have why not hire them), but because of the limited coverage. It does not seem that it will generate an earthquake in the market, because the changes of operator due to this new offer are not going to be noticed as much, nor does it seem that it will accelerate the plans of the rest of the operators. Although if there is one that starts with an advantage, that is MásMóvil, thanks to the work carried out by Euskaltel.

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