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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."
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.
I'm pretty sure Virgin isn't rolling out Fibre-to-the-home, just using their existing cable network, it really irks me that they get to advertise 'Fibre Optic Network' when it's set up pretty much the same as BT Openreach's, just with newer cables to the home.
If I'm not mistaken, BT Openreach is beating Virgin laying out fibre-to-the-home by presumably a long .. long time:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4068-openreach-fibre-to-the-home-coverage-to-double.html
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.
Youtube 1080p videos still require some buffering on my 5mb connection. Did I mention they're compressed 1080p? It's pretty compressed video, but it's still compressed, and only in stereo. And only 30fps. Some of us have screens that support larger than 1080p. Some of us have computers that can handle 1080p at 60, or even 120fps. Imagine if Mozilla couldn't complain about which compression method we use because everyone simply had enough bandwidth to stream uncompressed video.
I, for one, welcome our 1080p+, uncompressed 120fps streaming video lords
moox. for a new generation.
> "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.
I don't see the point of mandating that everyone have access that fast when it's fairly obvious that we don't need it right now and there's no reason to think we will anytime soon
One household with a few "normal" users and a couple of power users could simultaneously have people doing hi def 3D chat, or on demand 3D TV, internet radio in 5.1 or 7.1 (pointless for most pop music but you can get some music in surround sound and in future probably it may become more common as we get more storage space and bandwidth to play with), hosting their own website and games servers with possibly thousands of clients, using bit-torrent, downloading updates, backing up their data to an off-site server, hosting your media collection for streaming to mobile devices when you're out and about etc (why bother to get an iPod with 1TB of storage or have to synchronise your collection on multiple devices when you can stream it all from one main server?).
So there's plenty of useful stuff that we could be doing right now if we had a better network infrastructure. And If we don't upgrade the infrastructure now, we won't be able to do those things, and neither will we be able to even have the right mindset to design new applications that can make use of the extra bandwidth.. it's a bit of a chicken/egg scenario, and it's great to have some companies pushing forward despite the usual naysayers.
which is totally what she said