From today, 21,000 households and companies in Soest can opt for internet with a download speed of 1 gigabit per second (Gbit/s). This marks the telecom company’s completion of a nationwide operation that first began three years ago in Utrecht.
VodafoneZiggo always wants to offer customers the best entertainment and connection, so the company has been gradually connecting more than seven million households and companies to gigabit speeds over the past three years. To achieve this, Ziggo technicians have replaced 7.3 million connectors, 1.7 million connection cables and 441,000 amplifiers in street cabinets throughout the country. VodafoneZiggo has been modernising its network to meet the demands of the years ahead, doing so quickly and without the inconvenience of digging up the street. In addition to more capacity and faster upload and download speeds, the entire network is now even more stable.
Investment
Jeroen Hoencamp, CEO of VodafoneZiggo: "In recent years, we’ve seen our customers using more and more data for communication and entertainment. People are constantly online; for example, extensively meeting through Teams and Zoom, streaming films and series in HD and 4K anywhere in the home, and playing sophisticated online games. Our technology makes all this possible. Behind the scenes, we’re continuing to invest and make sure that the capacity and speed of our network evolves to meet this need. Pretty much like we’ve been doing for over 20 years."
Nationwide network
VodafoneZiggo has over 40,000 km of fibre-optic cables in the ground nationwide. Most of the distance travelled by internet data passes through this network, with the final leg to the customer going by cable. VodafoneZiggo has been using Docsis technology to do this for years. In 2019, the company started to gradually introduce the latest Docsis 3.1 standard. Customers could subsequently opt for the Ziggo Internet Giga subscription with a download speed of 1 Gbit/s.
Future-proof
For now, a speed of 1 Gbit/s is more than enough for most households. For example, 80 people can simultaneously hold meetings through MS Teams, and 40 people can simultaneously watch television in 4K.
According to Hoencamp, VodafoneZiggo's hybrid network is thus future-proof: "Downloading at 1 Gbit/s is actually just the start. We’ll be testing Docsis 4.0 early next year. This will allow us to easily progress to a download speed of 10 Gbit/s and an upload speed of more than 1 Gbit/s. These speeds aren’t needed at this stage; after all, there are no current applications that require that much capacity and speed. But with our network, we’ll be ready for them.
Photography: Yasmin Hargreaves