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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.
A 100MBs line will just create more virgins.
...what is she going to charge?
So that you can exceed your download cap in 5 minutes instead of half an hour?
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
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!).
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.
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!
I must be one of the few, too. I'm on the 50mbit service, and getting 50.1Mbit/s and 8ms ping according to speedtest.net. My 20Mbit service before was faultless, and also my 4Mbit service when I lived 90 miles from here (with NTL, before rebranded Virgin), and also my 2Mbit from my flat before that, and also my original 600kbit service in 2000 - and everyone I know on Virgin (and NTL before) has a similar story. (no I don't work for Virgin, just a happy customer)
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
You're talking about ADSL: Virgin offer ADSL in non-cable areas. Of COURSE you don't get the advertised speeds: ADSL is notorious for that. Those of us who live in Virgin Cable areas get much faster connections at the advertised speed: I'm paying for 20Mb and I'm getting 20Mb (& I checked the modem before I wrote that).
Basically your complaint is "ADSL is shit. I wish I had cable."
you dont get traffic shaping on the 50mb package, only 10 and 20.
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
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.