We review products independently, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use. At the cost of several million pounds, hidden inside an enormous storage space, Virgin Media built a house. Outside is a street sign that says you’re now entering ‘Connectivity Close.’ Inside are cutesy Virgin Media -branded crockery, or pillowcases in pairs - ‘Wi and ‘Fi’ printed on each. But this house isn’t for human habitation; it’s a place for new technology to live. It’s part of a triage where Virgin Media tests its latest WiFi products such as Intelligent WiFi which aims to improve its customers' broadband experience by, among other things, switching WiFi channels and frequencies automatically and giving users more control over how devices are connected to their router. Although in the past the company has used real houses (occasionally building a huge anechoic chamber in one of them), the vision of the ‘wireless warehouse’, as the company calls it, is to bring that capability under one roof. And increase it, too. The ‘Connected Crib’ The house itself is three stories high with 350 square meters of floor space and 18 rooms inside, making it approximately three times as large as the average home in the UK. Surrounding it is a blue and white fabric mesh called RAM (Radiation-absorbent material) that stops WiFi signals from bouncing around the building so that interference can be deliberately introduced into the system. Kitchens, living rooms, lofts and bedrooms are all recreated inside so that new routers and WiFi boosters can be tested as realistically as possible, with a proprietary carbon compound lining the walls to emulate the internet-blocking effects of different materials including breezeblocks, concrete, polyester, or brick. Virgin Media isn’t only using this to mimic a single property either; it’s large enough to test multiple Virgin Media devices that could be in a block of flats or other MDU (multidwelling unit) accommodation, or even a busy street. To that end, underneath the synthetic grass that runs around the building, there is a small hatch that runs from the front of the house to the back hiding a train system ‘driven’ by an automated robot. That robot is a stand-in for a real human being walking up and down, connecting to the numerous WiFi hotspots dotted around the property. Of course, a robot is not a perfect substitute for a flesh and blood person. For one thing, the fact that up to 60% of a human body is water means that radio waves are much easily absorbed, so Virgin Media says that the data collected by the machines are also reinforced by empirical data gathered by human volunteers - balancing between repeatable tests with true-to-life testing. 10,000 Wireless Connections Although Virgin Media’s pseudo-house might be the most homely environment to show how they test products, it’s not its only one. In another, much smaller room, is the same residential recreation on a much smaller scale. The room is a Faraday Cage - an enclosure used to block electromagnetic fields - which holds 10 PCs, each of which can emulate six different types of wireless card and 1000 wireless clients each. That adds up to a total of 10,000 wireless connections, ranging from a virtual iPhone XS Max pinging the router to a sluggishly old Android tablet. As you open the door to this room, a blast of heat hits you. That’s not just down to the exertion of the computers, but also so that Virgin Media can replicate the humidity or aridity in different countries. In the middle is Virgin Media’s Hub 3 device, sitting atop a turntable, one of the more recent devices to be put through its paces. By pushing traffic from one access point to the client, Virgin Media can measure a number of different variables; then by rotating the Hub 3, the company can optimise the device. If there is good connectivity on the left side but not on the right, Virgin Media's engineers might move the antennas around or find a new design that works better. And while for the most part this is a short affair - with some tests running for a minute or to - it can take some serious resources to get a product optimised. There are around 250,000 test cases that the devices are put through, and some of those can take between two weeks or a few months before it can be ticked off. Snapshots of Customer Use The final room in Virgin Media’s arsenal sits in the middle of these two extremes; in the middle is another Hub 3 on a similar turntable, but around it are a number of consumer devices. Whenever Virgin Media rolls out an update for existing devices, it will run a test in this room to ensure it doesn’t inadvertently cause issues with operating systems that could affect connectivity. New smartphones sit next to Sony's PS4 Pro consoles, which are on a plinth below some Android tablets. There are routers next to laptops, and even a rotary phone - although we can’t imagine gets great reception. All in all, there are 100 different products that get connected to one device for testing, so that Virgin Media can test it with real gadgets that the company knows its customers are using. Each of them are fully charged, all the time, and each of them are automated with Virgin Media's proprietary machine learning algorithm. This allows Virgin Media to recreate snapshots of customer use in an instant, getting multiple devices streaming video or playing music simultaneously to mimic realistic scenarios, even on devices that wouldn't usually open themselves up to automation such as iPhones and iPads. The ability to have this amount of control, remotely, over so many products is how Virgin Media is trying to tailor its products to both low and high use customers. It also makes it faster, too; to get an engineer to perform these tests would take a period of two or three weeks. With specific APIs designed to control almost every operating system consumers will interact with, that time can be cut to a matter of days or even hours. However, we won't know if Virgin Media's investment truly pays off until the release of WiFi 6 standard (or 802.11ax) routers - which are set to add new capabilities to routers in 2019, through improved multi-user connections, combining the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, and better router scheduling. Mugs with ‘streaming hot cuppa’ written on them or a blackboard saying “Let’s Chalk about Intelligent WiFi” on might not directly impact how good your router is, but having access to a replica home to test their new kit may give the Virgin Media the edge it needs to move faster than its rivals. Ultimately, an upcoming WiFi 6 router will be the testament to Virgin Media's testing chambers - we look forward to seeing what comes out of them.

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