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Virgin Promises 100Mbps Connections To UK Homes
registerShift writes "Virgin said it will roll out 100 megabit-per-second broadband connections to homes in the UK. The company said users will experience speeds 'very close' to what's advertised as it plans to deploy cable instead of ADSL used by competitors. 'There is nothing we can't do with our fiber optic cable network, and the upcoming launch of our flagship 100mbps service will give our customers the ultimate broadband experience,' Virgin Media's chief executive officer, Neil Berkett, said. This is just days after the FCC announced aims of 100Mbps by 2020, and companies panned it as unrealistic."
Of course it's unrealistic in America! That would require buying up all that dark fiber first of all (to make sure the backbone network can handle the increased speeds) and rolling out expensive FO cable to people who might not want to pay for it in the first place (personally, if my ISP rolled out Fiber-to-the-house I'd be buying a SCSI box and getting all the 1TB+ drives I could installed just so I could try and download everything I came across).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
I can't see why a domestic user needs that speed. I've got virgin cable and the 20MB is plenty for me. Perhaps this has something to do with their Tivo deal and on-demand content?
Widespread fast broadband access is key to a healthy economy and world-leading software industry. Just look at Japan, where...ohh, wait.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
A 100MBs line will just create more virgins.
...what is she going to charge?
It really, really, *really* irks me that Virgin's advertising constantly goes on about it being "fibre optic" where ADSL is copper.
Fact is, Virgin is NOT fibre optic in the sense that their advertising implies - at best and in some areas only, they have fibre to the cabinet. They do not offer fibre to the home anywhere (which ironically BT actually are offering in some new-build areas). BT also has FTTC in some areas already and is rolling this out into more rural areas to improve speeds there.
hope this not only promise.
Well I can certainly see why they're still a Virgin if they're capable of providing those kind of speeds.
So, does that mean that when Mr. Islamist Terrorist martyrs himself, he gets a (72 virgins x 100Mbps) = 7.2Gbps connection thrown into the bargain?
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
It better be the “very close ABOVE” kind, or they just admitted to not giving you what they advertise. Which would be illegal, wouldn’t it?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The quality of the Virgin brand is not honored by its out of date NTL service infrastructure. It really should be addressed if these services are to be of use to Small business individuals, Research students and the like. A friend of mine who's 20MB connection I share via wireless when I visit him was offline for a whole week, because he was late in paying bill by a couple of days. Having paid the bill, it required two visits by differing engineers and the modem being replaced as they knocked it out. Where is the cost effectiveness in that and in the year 2010. "Pay Bill, switch on", "Don't Pay bill switch off" my suggestion for service slogan. Beware if continuity of service is important to your use of the service.
I'm sure we all know by now that Virgin never actually manages even close to the speeds that they advertise. After talking to people who I know who use Virgin, I can tell this is definitely a widespread issue. What I mean by this is, on their 24Mbit plan, I would get no higher than about 200Kbytes per second, whereas on Sky I get around 800Kbytes a second on their 16Mbit plan. While I'm still not getting the speed advertised, the point is, I'm getting closer than I did with Virgin.
Virgin may advertise a 100Mb/s connection and be able to deliver a connection speed at that rate but nobody will be able to actually use it on that basis. Right now they advertise a 40Mb/s service and fail to deliver throughput any better than a 8Mb/s ADSL service for the most part.
It will largely be the same for other providers on the BT based FTTC and FTTP platforms as the real costs are not the connection but rather back haul onto the ISPs own network.
The comments already posted here about nobody needing more than 2Mb/s have a point - albeit I'd use a higher figure than that. The main driver for this is HD streaming but the internet is just not the right delivery platform for that. HD streaming depends upon being able to consistently throughput up to 25Mb/s for an extended period of time. Doing that via broadband simply is not feasible unless you hand the networks over to the existing media companies so that they can install proxy devices in every locale in which case what's the benefit to anyone as that will be horribly expensive. Existing FM and satellite broadcast technology is far more efficient.
I'd like to have a 100mbps connection while downloading games, videos and the occasional large file. Beyond that, I don't really need it. With 100mbps I could pull down a gigabyte in less than a minute and a half. At those rates my household would probably spend less than two hours a month actually utilizing the full bandwidth potential. And between the four of us we're online almost 24/7. I'm assuming Virgin is expecting the same from most of their customers. And as soon as heavy users start stressing their network, you'll see caps imposed.
> "There is nothing we can't do with our fibre optic cable network,
Apart from get it anywhere near approximately 50% of the population, and that is mostly in the very dense urban areas. Sure, wonderful if you live in an area that NTL cabled back in the 90s.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Virgin Promises Up To 100Mbps Connections To UK Homes
What you'll really get is something completely different
Summation 2
Well 100Mbit is all good and well but considering Virgin have some serious traffic shaping going on (4-12 peak time speed cap if you, err, use your connection iirc). It's a shame they don't just release a plan where they WONT cap you (ie you pay us XYZ for 200gig etc)
I'm on virgin, 10Mb plan (downloading hundreds of gigs per month). I could get faster, but to be honest I don't think it'd do much good. I suppose I generally wait about 30mins for a movie to download, and that could be 3 minutes @ 100Mbps, but what the hay. Anything that's time critical is with me quickly enough, as its usually small, so I haven't upgraded. 100Mbps would be nice, but not if it's expensive.
As to complaints about the service, you should move to my area. On the 10Mbps plan, my ftp runs at 1.2MB/s for the majority of the time. If you get a calculator out, I think you'll find that that's pretty much what they're advertising. It typically drops to 300KB/s between the hours of 4pm and 9pm, but that's in their ToS, and I max the throttle at all other times, near enough.
All in all I would say that Virgin give me exactly what I pay for, and their customer service (while outsourced to india) is actually surprisingly good.
Big thumbs up for this.
Well the 50Mbps package costs £38, all of £5 more than I was paying for 20Mbps and a phone. So I really don't see where you are coming from... And I've had a substantially better service from cable that I have ever had from ADSL, but as always YMMV.
DPI of your internet connection at twice the maximum speed currently available on their network!
I'll stick with my favoured LLU ADSL ISP (Andrews and Arnold - No filtering, no shaping, almost constantly get max connection speed in my area (8Mb/s), first line support is an engineer, not a child with a script).
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
...the line quality is often shit. I was one of many that got duped by Virgin on this matter. Yes we pay atrocious amounts for 20mb (something that, in my home country of Norway, is a pretty basic speed) and yes we do get between 19 and 15 most of the day. The problem is we have pings of 300+ms (often 1000+) jitter of the same values, and anywhere between 5% to 50% packet loss (yes...50%...).
On top of this the upload speeds are terrible, and when asked about this they simply say "we don't support upload"....whatever that means.
So what does this mean for the average user? Well, if you like online gaming you can forget it. Unless you stay up until 3 in teh morning, most games are unplayable. The same goes for VoIP, and anything that requires a constant, consistent connection.
So "the country's best internet package" gets you abused by most of the rest of the world, when trying to play online games. Take my advice, don't use Virgin. Better yet, don't live in the UK (if you value good internet).
100 Mbit/sec isn't of much use if the cap is 4GB for 35 GBP. You'll just use the cap faster.
... but I'd rather be stuck on 2Mbps than have to put up with their extremely shitty customer service again.
Broken promises for installation date, way way over what they estimated, with no communication about the delay. And when we wanted to cancel the service, we were put on hold for around 2 hours, at a pretty costly rate. Bully for you if your service gets installed without a hitch, I won't be taking that risk again.
I accept I know nothing. Insulting my ignorance is wasted on me.
Then its just like S Korea. Any provider can tap into the shared box and link you to their back haul network, beyond cable or adsl.
The real trick is the telco nodes seeing you as a bunch of adsl users rather than a single users.
If you live in a new estate or flats with optical rolled out then your just another consumer who would have got a customer pipe deal in the past for the $$$.
The real trick is the back haul and shared links around the UK.
If its all saturated in the city or suburbia and then onto clean wide pipes, where you are linked up to and the upgrade cycle could be interesting.
One old box might be great for many adsl2, start adding lots of optical to it and will it cope?
Will users find optical dead zones? 100mbps on the box, real world links are no more than a few 10 % of that for years unless its with in the estate, building.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The stated speed of 100MB/s will only work as long you don't actually use it that often. If you use Bittorrent and/or Youtube/iPlayer too much Virgin will trottle down your connection (they do it alreay with their current 40MB/s fibre offer.
Oh, and by the way, your connection will be silently censored.
And let's not forget that Virgin is also a media company: if you, your kids, the neighbour (that managed to hack into your Wireless connection because you used no or easy encryption) or anybody else actually downloads music-tracks/videos/games/apps from some fishy place or other through your connection, expect a call from the appropriate industry's lawyers.
Last but not least, most Virgin companies have incredibly bad costumer service: even when their products are good, you can't trust them not to overcharge you, auto-renew your contracts against your wishes and/or other fishy practices. Usually they include incredible clausules in their contract designed to make it impossible for you to leave (good luck remembering to cancel your contract at a very specific couple of days in the year before they auto-renew).
you dont get traffic shaping on the 50mb package, only 10 and 20. so its unlikely they will shape the 100mb either.
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
When are they actually going to lay fibre to my town then? I realize 60k people is far too few for them bother with - no cable provider has ever rolled out cable to Maldon.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Sorry, I've got 50Mbit/s cable here in Austria, the provider offers 100Mbit/s too (but the package deal sweet spot is 50Mbit), I guess I'll have 100Mbit a little bit earlier than 2020.
The biggest issue is the missing competition in this area, as ADSL (not VDSL) can really compete with cable economically.
And the biggest issue is the situation in the countryside, where many people have slower downstream than my own upstream, ...
There's a while we got this in france... at least something good here...
The PR says:
"There is nothing we can't do with our fibre optic cable network, and the upcoming launch of our flagship 100mbps service will give our customers the ultimate broadband experience".
The web site says:
"You're not in a fibre optic area, but can still get our brilliant broadband down your phone line."
I'm on their 20Mbit package at the moment; I don't really need any faster downstream at the moment, but I would like a faster upstream (currently 1Mbit), so what's the upstream going to be on the 100Mbit downstream package?
What is really missing is information about what traffic management they will apply to the 100mbps line. I agree that the price for the 50mbps line is reasonable-ish - and currently they don't traffic manage the 50mbps connections, but they DO traffic manage their 20mbps line.
I would be well pissed off to pay for a 100mbps line, and find out that after downloading the first gig of a 20 gig download the speed crawls to 2mbps or something equally ridiculous.
I regularly have to download 20 gig virtual images for work, so any traffic shaping could make the otherwise great 100mbps connection a very bad deal for me.
3-d hi-res port is gonna need a whole lot more than that. Especially when we add the "4-d" tactile component.
'Cos we know Virgin has phorm in this area.
In the New York Area, Optimum Online Ultra is 101 Mbps
http://optimum.com/online/ultra.jsp
granted, it's expensive.
I unfortunately have a Virgin Media connection, it sucks, the downloads are throttled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Media#Bandwidth_throttling a lot, often to 1/4 speed. Uploads are currently going at a paltry 20-30KB/s - That's Over 6 hours to upload a 700MB CD!!!!!!!!!.
Also - See http://techdirt.com/articles/20091130/0316037113.shtml/ Deep Packet Inspection and File Sharing Monitoring http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/26/virgin_media_detica// and Phorm the advertising crap http://badphorm.co.uk/news.php?item.46.4/
And they don't support filesharers like Talk Talk http://www.pcworld.com/article/146785/virgin_music_campaigns_against_illegal_filesharing.html/ and http://torrentfreak.com/isp-will-protect-file-sharers-from-music-industry-disconnection-threat-080404// they will happily hand over your details to all and sundry if accused of copyright infringement - this handing over of personal details is probably Illegal itself under the data-protection act. Also they force you to have a phone line with high call costs or else you are charged an arm and a leg for the internet connection.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Wake me up when they can serve all of London first.
Where I live they don't provide any service whatsoever (Wandsworth!).
All these grandiose claims sound terribly hollow.
I lived in a VM cable area for two years now, I was perfectly happy with Virgin until the DPI rollout. To be fair at least they told us about it unlike BT. I have always got the speed I was promised, if you could find a server fast enough to fill the line. And as far as caps go, they where also clear about it and even upgrade the cap or turn it off when possible.
But DPI was the last straw for me. Most of the other things where technical problems to do with networking, DPI is not, It is spying for the sake of greed and puts the cost on to us customers, who don’t need it for any reason.
So when I went to cancel my service, I was told that I would have to finish my contract with them or pay off the rest of the contract!!!. After a few emails and calls I gave up, only had three months left. I still think it is outrages that they will not let me go, since they are the ones that broke the contract with me.
Now I am off, back to ADSL land. At least I can switch providers if they start using DPI.
Been looking at some of the LLU in my area. It looks like it might be better to stick with the devil I know.
I like the look of these guy’s http://www.aaisp.net.uk/.
But with my usage it would cost a fortune.
This is also wrong. 50mb connections run on completely different freq's to the 10/20mb connections.
Cable is crap and will always be crap due to the way that its shared bandwidth.
At least with my 1.5Mbps ADSL, I can actually GET 1.5Mbps even in peak time.
...but this whole thing about "unrealistic" and yada-yada is very foreign to someone who has grown up in Sweden. I have had a 100/100 Mbit/s unmetered connection for the last 3 years. It costs me about 45-50 USD / month.
This is not uncommon, rather it's the rule. It's also quite rare to see services below 10 Mbit/s unless you are in a rural area.
The reason you don't see 100 Mbit conenctions in the US is because the big telcos are not feeling the heat, they are lazy.
Virgin media don't like file sharers. They'll give you a big fat pipe to download their paid for content, but monitor the packets to catch you sharing the stolen content.
Try file sharing on one of their lines and watch your upload and download speeds fade away.
I used to be with Virgin broadband, and their customer service was appalling. I needed to disconnect my service as I was moving, and they made it so needlessly difficult that in the end I just severed all contact with them and let them figure out my disconnection for themselves- I certainly wasn't flushing any more cash down their drain.
I suspect they're called Virgin because they don't give a fuck.
There is nothing we can't do with our fiber optic cable network
Except deploy it across most of the country, it seems..
All virgin companies are scum. They promise everything. They deliver nothing. They snoop on your traffic. Total scum.
If it was a choice between Virgin and nothing I'd do without internet altogether.
It's why Japan gets all the cool phones. Its also why average U.S. broadband speeds will likely never match those in places like South Korea and Japan. And, to a lesser extent, the U.K. It's not that its impossible; it's just way more expensive.
On a somewhat unrelated note, while Virgin is starting to offer "up to" 100Mbps connections in the UK and AT&T thinks 100Mbps in 10 years is somewhat unfeasible, Welho (Finland's biggest cable provider) announced a couple weeks back that they've started offering a new 200/10 Mbit/s option for all their cable customers. The cost was 59,90€ if I remember correctly.
And why is this news, In the Netherlands, we already have faster connections, up to 120Mbps for consumers.
http://www.upc.nl/internet/
I just want to know how we can be sure the person making the promise is a virgin, and why that person's virginity is relevant.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville