Virgin Media UK Pilots 200Mbps Broadband Speeds

MJackson writes "UK cable operator Virgin Media has announced the first real-world customer pilots of up to 200Mbps broadband services using DOCSIS3 technology from Cisco, which could make it one of the fastest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the world. Following successful lab trials, the 6 month long pilot started last week in Ashford, Kent (England), and will ultimately employ 100 customers in the testing process. The pilot will, among other things, test future online consumer applications, including High Definition Internet TV (HD IPTV) and the ability to deliver applications and support for home IT needs through its network. By comparison J:Com in Japan supplies broadband at up to 160Mbps and Cablevision in the US supplies broadband at up to 101Mbps. Like Virgin Media, both companies use DOCSIS3 technology for broadband over cable networks."

Comments

Re:Stop it!

[TheRaven64]

It's okay, it's Virgin Media. For those of you outside the UK, this means:

• Upstream just about fast enough for the TCP ACKs generated by saturating the downstream, but only just.
• Soft caps, so if you download more than a GB or so, or upload a few hundred MBs, you get throttled back to ISDN speeds for a few hours.
• Painful technical support that's been outsourced, off-shored, and dramatically reduced in size in spite of being understaffed to start with.
• Subscription to the same government-approved (but not government-controlled or publicly-accountable) censor as the other major UK ISPs (the IWF).
• Phorm.

Virgin Media are so bad they almost make BT look good. Almost.

Stop bragging, you're seriously making me want to stab my eyes with grapefruit spoons.

At least you still have grapefruit spoons. They are no longer sold in the UK, due to health and safety concerns over people cutting their mouths (I honestly wish I was making this one up - you can still find them in second-hand shops, but good luck finding new ones).

Re:3. 2. 1.

[Anonymous Coward]

The USA is a vast land with lots of empty space where as England has around 80 million people shoved into a tiny space

The UK as a whole has around 60 million people. England has less than that. Britain has a similar population density to most of the costal states in the USA - lower than some - and has some of the worst broadband in Europe. The UK has the 48th highest population density in the world, with 246/km^2. New Jersey has 438/km^2, so presumably it has much better Internet access?

It's also worth noting that the population density numbers for the UK are massively skewed by London, which has an insane population density of 4,761km^2. The London metropolitan area contains around 14m people; around 25% of the UK population. Outside this area, the population density is well in line with the most densely populated 10-15 states, which accounts for a significant proportion of the total US population.

Even in the less-populated US states, the density isn't as bad as it would at first appear. Take Utah, for example, the 40th most populous state with only 10 people per square km. Of these, 2.7m people, almost half live in Salt Lake City, with a population density up at 643.3/km^2. I suspect you will find that more than half of the people in the USA live in regions with a greater population density than the UK average so, by your argument, I'd expect all of these urban and suburbanites to have 100+Mb/s connections.

Re:Stop it!

[TheRaven64]

Do they have a transparent proxy? Virgin Media, the helpful people in TFA, run one but it used to frequently get overloaded. If you manually configure a proxy then you bypass the transparent one. If your ISP advertises proxy settings, try using them. If this doesn't speed things up, call them and complain.