Slashdot Mirror
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."
Just shut up, ok? Last month, my provider finally converted me from 1.5 mbps to 7 mbps. (Fairpoint, just bought Northeastern USA from Verizon) Do you understand that only now can we start using things like Netflix Watchnow and the like? Oh, but Youtube, for whatever reason, still buffers for 5 minutes.
Anyway, my point is this. Stop bragging, you're seriously making me want to stab my eyes with grapefruit spoons.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
200Mbps down with traffic shaping that'll cut you'r speed to 2Mbps after the first 5GB of transfer. Consumers don't need this kind of download speed, what we do need is more upload speed say a 5Mbps symmetric service.
....the US overall reaches new broadband speeds of nearly 20mbps for half its citizens in the year 2025!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Cablevision in the US supplies broadband at up to 101Mbps
Cablevision has announced that they are going to offer 101 Mbps service. Hold off on giving them credit until they actually do it.
Rather then trying furiously to single out their biggest users and punish, we have a company thats actually focusing on improving their infrastructure to provide a better experience. I'm not sure which will help their image more...
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
If my Cable company had any competition, any competition at all - perhaps someday I might get a chance to switch to a service like this. Oh well - I guess I will just have to make due with 6Mbps for the next decade or so.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Yeah, maybe in house, when no one else is connected.. and the sun is at the perfect angle and theres a fish hopping through the air in the middle of the atlantic. But not just any fish, you see this is a special fish, the fish of broadband. And he only shows up but once every fortnight and if you look carefully, you will hear him laughing at us all in the distance
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
...if you are unable to speak?
call me unimpressed if most of the bandwidth is so the cable company can sell me TV over IP for no good reason. otherwise, you will reach your DL cap rather quickly.
Lest anyone think DOCSIS 3 is just new hardware at both ends, let me assure you - it isn't.
From: http://www.cable360.net/ct/strategy/emergingtech/34304.html
The DTI specification has a distance limitation of 200 meters between the CMTS and edge QAM modulator. There are ideas of utilizing global positioning system (GPS) to sync multiple time servers to allow the edge QAM modulator to be in a hub site and the CMTS in the headend.
The US of A is a big place. Much bigger than say - the UK. Or Japan. Each of which are about the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined. The US of A is MUCH MUCH larger. You start running into economies of scale, since your HFC needs to run to individual neighborhood drops.
It's a much bigger problem, and not quite the answer to FiOS dropping MMF right into your home.
The USA is a vast land with lots of empty space where as England has around 80 million people shoved into a tiny space, lots of cramped little towns and therefore its easier and cheaper to install a high-speed network. Korea is similar - 80% mountain and then lots of very densely populated towns filled with apartment blocks that are worth bringing FTTH services to.
Its all a trade off really, you can live in a densely populated region with no space and have fast internet or live in the country side where there is plenty of space, cheap land and unpolluted air and put up with slow DSL or wireless unless you have the money to lease 200Mbits of capacity from a satellite.
The good news for all you yanks stuck with 'slow' connections is that most Brits won't be able to get it either. Cable isn't available in any of the slightly rural places (Even inside the M25!) and all their traffic is analysed by MI5, MI6, The cops, the local council or any other government agency who wants to dig up dirt on them.
Something about "Give me Virgin speed" sounds a bit off-putting. Strange days.
"To err is human, to mod Funny divine."
The U.S. will not catch up with other countries on the race to national broadband until:
1. The definitions of what a "broadband" connection actually is are cleared up
2. REAL competition is introduced to drive down competitors costs (the cost for cable internet access is still outrageous!)
3. The content of the internet mandates broadband connection speeds to experience.
We're probably closest to #3... but we are bogged down in legalese for #1 and #2 is frighteningly far away. Until the government forces competition for the cable companies into existence... prices will remain through the roof. Money mongers are everywhere...
I just got Comcast's 'Ultra' package that gives me 50Mbps. But since it's capped at 250GB monthly, I can't exactly use it as much as I want. What good is crazy fat bandwidth if one gets shut off after three days?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Pf, 250 Million-bits...!? I demand 1 Billion-bits! *pinky to mouth*
No sig for you!!
Right, I live in central New York. Mind telling me who I should call to get 100 Mbit like other similar cities in the world? Or is New York not crowded enough for you?
Interesting observation. But my anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that broadband came to rural, low density areas before the telcos/cable operators brought it to the higher density neighborhoods. I've had broadband at my cabin for almost 10 years, thanks to the local public power company. Meanwhile, living within spitting distance of the Microsoft campus (one of the more densly populated ane wealthy areas), Verizon stopped offering DSL and blocked CLECs from leasing lines for years. Until thei finally got around to installing a FiOS system last year.
The big network operators appear to be spending most of their time keeping competition out. Where they deem the market too small to bother with, the competition steps in.
Have gnu, will travel.
Eh, not so much. You hear this a lot, usually as a reason that public transport is "impossible".
80% of the US population live in urban and suburban settings.
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.
Cablevision is in the tristate area, they offer 101Mbps for around $100/mo.
People only Say "Central New York" when they mean "Upstate" Basically Middle of no where or small cities. Cablevision has parts of the NY Metropolitan area but Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island are Cablevision free.
My cable company has had a pilot customer running at 1Gbps since late last year.
I suspect the real news here is the technology Virgin Media are using, not the speed, but it's a bit hard to tell from the summary and I'm too lazy to do the editors' job for them.
Cable isn't available in any of the slightly rural places (Even inside the M25!)
Very True,i live in harrow and cant get virgin cable even though its available just 2 streets away.Virgin's customer services never replies to any communication about extending services
Wanted : A Signature.
Virgin ("We've Never Done It Before, And We Don't Really Know How To" Media), operators of Britain's only cable television network, has launched a new 200-megabit Internet service.
"That's 200 megabits total over the day, usually," said Virgin Media phone menu robot Mark Schweitzer, "but it's very fast when it's going. Plain old ADSL can't hold a candle to it. You can hit your download limit in minutes!"
Customers will be able to add the boost free for three months, after which they will need to pay an additional GBP5 per month. The three months will start when Virgin ascertain the customer might possibly have thought about it in passing, probably last June. Should you be in any way less than satisfied, Virgin will be happy to leave you in a phone queue for three days, then disconnect your service entirely and charge you to switch it on again rather than just go back to the old plan like you asked them. And cut the cable outside your house and claim you did it. And pass your address to the record companies so they can send you threatening letters.
Virgin Media will be releasing the new broadband service before Christmas. "We've heard that you can use things called 'computers' to send messages and even pictures. That'd be a good service to offer! We have this bloke in facilities who knows a bit about computers, we could get him to run it between refilling the coffee machines. If we tried, we could probably make it as reliable as our telly. Nobody really minds when the football drops out ten minutes before the end, do they."
Virgin Media was founded as an experiment by ethically challenged psychologists to ascertain just how abusively awful customer service could get and still have anyone giving them money. The company is sponsored by British Telecom to make them look good by comparison.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Why is 200mb/s the one of the fastest in the world when they're doing 1gb/s up and down in Japan? You call 1/5 of that comparable to 1gb/s?????
Today Comcast and Time Warner announced 200mbps service. Now you can exceed your monthly bandwith cap in an hour.
They're opening their network to other broadband companies, as a way of increasing revenues and heading off any issues with monopolisation of cable infrastructure. (They gradually hoovered up most of the UK's other cable companies.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I live in Fairfield, Iowa, a town of ten thousand people in the middle of nowhere, and we have 100 mbit (full duplex) fiber to the home for $65/mo.
Granted, it's capped at 20 gigs/mo, though I have no idea to what extent this is enforced. But when I put that speed and that price in my Slashdot sig, it seemed like every third post, someone would reply to me asking where I live.
Seems most places are stuck with Comcast and friends...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
What's the point of all these increased downstream speeds if the upload speeds for your favorite sites, etc are still the same? Let's make the other end faster!
with 180Mbps being used by the UK government to spy on you.
The USA is a vast land with lots of empty space where as England has around 80 million people shoved into a tiny space,
England does not have 80 million people, the UK (this involves more than England) has around 60 million people, and they don't all live in dark satanic mills anymore. Really it's not so much more populated than some US states, particularly if you're looking at the cities - these are roughly comparable between countries for population density.
Regards: a Scandinavian.
Sorry , couldn't help myself.
Right, I live in central New York. Mind telling me who I should call to get 100 Mbit like other similar cities in the world? Or is New York not crowded enough for you?
They still have to support the non-crowded areas. Money an infrastructure are still being spread a lot further.
The United States is a difficult country to wire. This didn't stop being true when it became fashionable to bash Americans.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
200Mbps IS comparable to 1Gbps. The comparison reads:
200Mbps < 1Gbps
Actually, the South East of England is not the most densely populated part of the country. That honour goes to the North West, around Manchester / Liverpool / Leeds etc. For example, go round the M25, it is mostly countryside. Go round the M60, it is mostly built up.
England is actually less densely populated than Germany.
Its all a trade off really, you can live in a densely populated region with no space and have fast internet or live in the country side where there is plenty of space, cheap land and unpolluted air and put up with slow DSL or wireless
Hmm. I live in Saskatchewan, Canada. One of the least densely populated places on the planet with plenty of space, cheap land, unpolluted air, beautiful natural spaces and 100 Mbps with DOCSIS 3.0 (http://www.cedmagazine.com/Shaw-100-Mbps-with-DOCSIS-020409.aspx) What's that bit about trade-offs? Some of us are quite happy having it all, you know.
Anything that lets you transfer a full BD 1080p stream in faster than realtime (~50Mpbs) is fairly comparable if you ask me. I got 20Mbit now (for real too), and whether downloading a new Linux CD takes me 5 minutes (20Mbit), 30 seconds (200Mbit) or 6 seconds (1Gbps) doesn't really matter. I wish my upload was better though, I only got 20/2Mbit and wish it was symmetric like 20/20Mbit. Give it another few years and it'll probably be standard anyway...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Of course the British would be the first to be able to download porn at 200 Mbits/second. They are the ones that really need it!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
seriously. my friend has the most expensive broadband package they offer and yes it is really really awesomely fast. Only downer being that it gets throttled for a few hours if downloads exceed 5gb in 24 hours. This is where the problem lies. He is willing to pay more if they provide a TRUELY unlimited package. They never will.
It's a typo, they meant 200mb/s, or 1 bit every 5 seconds.
That said, I can get 1.1MB/s downloads (around 8.8Mb/s) from my 10Mb/s Virgin cable connection. Perhaps you should complain to them instead of Slashdot? They usually try to resegment on oversubscribed parts of their network.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Internet Service Providers
That's quite a mouthful...
(ISPs)
Ah, thank you TFA!
The population of England is only 60 million just now - half the population is located in the large cities like Birmingham, Nottingham and London. However, most of the IT industry (around 300,000 people) is located in the Greater London Area or Home Counties. It is easy upgrading central London - that area always seems to be upgraded first, followed by the other university cities like Cambridge, Oxford, Reading and Edinburgh.
However, for those out in the countryside - just two or three miles outside the city bypasses, they probably won't be able to get cable TV, let alone high-speed broadband through DSL. That is the other half of the population. BT has just started to upgrade the trunk lines to the local mini-exchanges from copper to fibre-optic.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
160Mbit max in Japan?
You gotta be kidding me... thats insane!
Insane in that its SLOW!! Buwhahahaha!
1000Mbit baby!: http://www.hikari-one.com/gigatoku/index.html
Sorry, most of that page is in Japanese... but you can clearly see the numbers "1Gbps" and "1000Mbps" there on the flash add in the middle. Sucks to be the rest of the world...
to be realistic, you can burn through a gigabyte in 40 seconds with those speeds.
250GB is only 3 hours at those speeds.
What will they do?
What's the point of having those speeds available, if you burn through your month's ration in 3 hours?
6 hours for comcast's DOCSIS 3.0 implementation. A month's ration in 6 hours. Something's gotta give fellas.
Linux is not piracy. Netflix HD is not piracy. Game demos over Xbox Live are not piracy. Hulu is not piracy. Steam is not piracy.
Something's gotta give.
They're using their grammar skills there.
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. ... 80 - 120 miles up the I-15 corridor) contains about 2M of the population. None of those are 'half the population living in Salt Lake City'.
... yet my girlfriend (in a SLC suburb) gets worse internet speeds than I do in Pocatello, ID.
Um, no. Salt Lake City only has a population of about 180K. The SLC metro area has a population of about 1.1M, and the Wasatch Front (covering from Ogden in the north to Provo in the south
Now, the Wasatch Front total area is *roughly* about the size of Rhode Island, with about twice the population
Personally, I'd kill for 10Mbs, let alone 100Mbs.
Don't forget that Virgin Media are part of the Virgin empire which amongst other things also owns a large recording company.
They actually do all kinds of nasty things like port blocking, filtering and keeping logs on your traffic which they'll hand to any "content owner" as soon as they ask for it.
So yeah, your connection might theoretically be high speed, but in practice they will block you from using the extra speed.
Are you sure you're not just reading the units the wrong way? The connection is sold in megabits per second, but most browsers and other download clients rate downloads in kilobytes or megabytes per second. A 2Meg connection should cap out at around 250kBps - which would explain your readings.
They took a film crew to a small village in India. Every day, under cover of darkness, container loads of British Grapefruits were dumped at the village border. Children as young as 5 were working 14 hour days in the grapefruit cutting sheds. Everywhere you looked there were people with mildly smarting eyes and slightly sticky fingers, was like something Dante might have written about. When the undercover reporter confronted the owner he just muttered something about lack of scurvy.
200mbps? LOL! Kill me in envy anger, but here in Latvia ISP called Lattelekom currently tests new line which will bring unlimited 1GBit fiber-optics to home users quite soon. Currently some of my friends use this huge canal as a test customers. Currently speed is limited to 100mbps, at the end of year they plan to launch publicly available pilot at 500mbps and then move to 1gbps. And yes, latvians are quite used having 100mbps at home for 20-40 bucks/mo. You can start hating and killing me now :)
Heh... If only I had mod points!
I don't know who modded you "informative", but your comment is full of inaccuracies. 1) The population of England is around 50 million, not 80 million. 2) The USA has plenty of high density population centres, too. 3) Don't be so paranoid. MI5 and MI6 have neither the resources or inclination to analyse your traffic. Local council? Don't be stupid.
Looks like the Matrix is real. "CMTSs typically carry only IP traffic. Traffic destined for the cable modem from the Internet, known as downstream traffic, is carried in IP packets encapsulated in MPEG transport stream packets." Now I just need to find out which channel to switch to.