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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."
The quality of the Virgin brand is not honored by its out of date NTL service infrastructure.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.
Not only are they deceitful in their advertising (few if any get the advertised speeds), but Virgin are also one of the biggest enemies of fair Internet access in the UK. Witness the CEO of Virgin Media's reported comments that net neutrality is "a load of bollocks" and that Virgin Media are arranging deals with various content providers to deliver their content faster over their competitors.
Virgin can promise me whatever amount of bandwidth they like (not that they've ever delivered on their advertising from what I hear), I'll never support them and I'll continue to explain to those that ask my advice (I'm one of the go-to technical people for a lot of friends) exactly why I don't like them and suggest competitors.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I agree that this is a bit misleading. Virgin isn't alone in doing this - it seems to be a common thing for FTTN (fibre to the node) networks everywhere. In my city (Canberra, Australia), there is a company called TransACT (http://www.transact.com.au) that has an extensive network which they also like to advertise as being fibre. But it's only fibre to each distribution box (each servicing 50-100 homes), then a short copper link which they run to the premises. They run VDSL at 52 Mbps over the copper, delivering IPTV, phone and Internet access. So like the Virgin proposal, it's only fibre to the node, not to the home. Some areas are being upgraded to VDSL2 which brings speeds up towards 100 Mbps.
Not to say that's a bad thing - the short copper runs mean you are guaranteed the advertised speed (unlike ADSL2+, on which you get 'as fast as your line will allow', which can be pretty bad if your copper line is more than 3 or 4 km long). But to contrast their 'fibre' network to 'crappy old DSL' is plainly wrong (especially considering they even use an xDSL technology for the last mile!).
Personally the reason I'm looking forward to fibre-based networks is not so much the increase in downstream speed (my 24 Mbps ADSL2+ service is great for the moment), but better upstream speed (my 1 Mbps upload rate is becoming increasingly inadequate as the size of data I upload increases, e.g. uploading photos to Flickr which are 6+ MB each).
ADSL (and to a lesser extent cable) are highly asymmetrical services. You can get symmetrical DSL links (SHDSL for instance), but they tend to have lower aggregate speeds (e.g. 5Mbps/5Mbps) and be very expensive. Fibre gives us the opportunity to have some truly beefy, symmetrical home links, which we'll need as applications become increasingly two-way/interactive.
Put it this way. I'd rather have a 20/20 Mbps connection than a 100/1 Mbps connection (or even a 1Gbps/1Mbps!). Upload speed is nice!
We already have 100Mbs in Romania, for ~13 USD/month. This is not available for every home, only in bigger cities.
Same here - I would never accuse them of not delivering exactly what they promised. But try downloading two episodes of something in 720p and then see how close to 10mbps you get afterwards (hint: you're throttled to 2.5). And I'm unsure how exactly they accomplish the throttling, but it seems to me that once the throttling kicks in even extremely low-bandwidth tasks like simple browsing are painfully slow. 2.5mbps should be plenty fast enough, and yet somehow really isn't.
Ding. I work in a 90's era business park that can only get crappy ADSL. The NTL/Telewest/Virgin cable runs end just across the road, and they are adamant that they have no plans to extend it. This is business custom they're turning down here, and what's amazing is that their attitude is quite openly "Nope, not interested. Go with BT."
Given that their residential service is much more expensive than a BT/Sky package, and that their only USP, content on demand, hasn't been meaningfully refreshed in months, I guess they've decided to just turtle up and squeeeeze their existing customer base as much as possible, rather than invest in getting any new custom.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Agreed. It all looks smooth till you go and download that Linux ISO (DVD). The first 3Gb come across at close to the advertised speeds, then you're capped down to 768Kb/s.
I suspect they do something to the stream, too. I've never managed to d/l an ISO yet where the checksum tallied.
Maybe one day we'll need to transfer more data than that, but 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.
There's a few problems with that...
The biggest one is that, apparently, US ISPs just aren't going to roll out upgrades unless they're forced to.
I keep seeing folks on here talking about their 20 Mbps connections... Other folks have 10 Mbps... The fastest I have available is 5 Mbps. That's it.
The problem is that the local ISPs have a virtual monopoly. I don't have any real options. I either make do with the 5 Mbps, or I don't have Internet.
If somebody doesn't mandate upgrades, I won't see anything more than 5 Mbps for years.
The other problem is that you don't seem to have a grasp of just how much bandwidth a house can use.
I've got three computers in my house... Plus a pile of consoles and set-top boxes... At any given point in time we might have a movie downloading on the DVR, a couple Pandora streams going, a couple on-line games going, maybe a movie streaming from Netflix, and possibly some vacation photos or movies downloading.
My kid virtually lives on FaceBook. My wife has a fancy digital camera that takes ginormous pictures. All three of us listen to Pandora. All three of us are gamers.
It is very easy for us to saturate our 5 Mbps connection.
100 Mbps seems like it would be more than enough for now... Overkill, perhaps...
But what if I actually owned an HD TV and wanted to download/stream HD movies? What if I had more than one TV/DVR/set-top box that wanted to download/stream that HD content at once? What if I was trying to use VOIP at the same time?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde