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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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?????
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?
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.
200Mbps IS comparable to 1Gbps. The comparison reads:
200Mbps < 1Gbps
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.