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Virgin Media Demos World's Fastest Internet Service In the UK
siliconbits writes with word that yesterday, "UK-based cable broadband provider Virgin Media announced that it has begun testing internet speeds of up to 1.5Gbps in London using four startups from the 'Silicon Roundabout' hub as lucky guinea pigs. The 1.5Gbps trial, Virgin Media claims, uses the same cable infrastructure and technology that powers the broadband service for millions of households in the UK and is even faster than the projected 1Gbps speed that South Korean ISPs are proposing to implement in 2012. Earlier this year, ARRIS announced that it is working with SK broadband to deliver speeds of up to 800Mbps by combining 16 Downstream channels."
you mean more marketing BS.
Do you care to explain?
Yet more broadband out of reach of pretty much everyone. I'd find it far more impressive if Virgin were to, you know, actually expand their current cable coverage....
Fat chance of that happening though. I'd say it's about as likely as BT bringing faster-than-ADSL1 speed Internet access to the majority of rural parts of the UK this decade.
So how does this work? I need a special adapter? 10 GbE?
Surely it's a datarate, since bandwidth refers to a range of frequencies in an analogue signal.
Speaking as a Virgin Media customer I can say this wheeze is just more marketing. Their network is mostly a pile of shit that's degraded and throttled to hell if you use it for what it's built for longer than ten minutes during peak time. Fact is, if you're one of the overwhelming majority of customers you're probably going to put up with an even shittier service when this is rolled out.
This is the same tired old Branson formula. (Yes, I know Branson doesn't own Virgin. He's just a major shareholder and sold out the customers to pocket a license fee each year for the Virgin brand.) Create impressive sounding headline, "borrow authority" from some young and desperate startup and schmooze all your media pals with juicy but meaningless drivel, gouge as much as you can then sell it off for three times what it's worth before you get rumbled.
This will come with a 1.5 gigabit cap to keep the "bandwidth hogs" at bay.
I can get up to 60Mbps with Powerboost Technology (TM). Just wish the bloody benchmarking utilities wouldn't keep lying to me saying I only get 7.6Mbps... I don't know why they're being so dishonest. Seriously what could they possibly gain?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I am sure in this crowd I'll get booed...but what would I use this for? I can already stream HD video. I suppose it might be good if I was downloading HD videos for viewing later, I guess amazon is letting you do that now. But my bandwidth I get on basic FIOs is more than enough about 99% of the time. I find more often that the source is the bottleneck not my pipe. I'd rather see them focusing on widening their pipes so they can't whine and complain (or charge you to hell) when people actually use the bandwidth they're given.
Now I can hit my monthly bandwidth cap in what? 27 seconds?
You could have a 1.5Pbs (peta* bits per second) connection to your ISP, but when the rest of the Internet sucks, at what point does how big your pipe to your ISP become irrelevant.
I know that the big UK ISPs are all peered with the BBC so things like iPlayer don't even touch "the Internet" so it could be good from an IPTV point of view with established players, but that's only a transient benefit.
From a wider point of view, would I notice much difference between my current 8MB (give or take) ADLS and 1.5Gb fibre?
* lots of
1
0
1
0
1 VS 110001101010100101010101010101001
1
1
1
0
Virgin aggressively traffic shapes its network 24/7 and has download limits in place most of the day. When you go over the limits your connection is throttled back by 80% or more (combined up/down speed).
This is just a publicity stunt. They like to claim they provide a high speed service but the reality is that their network just isn't up to it. If it was there would be no need for throttling. VM should fix their current problems before rolling out ever faster and ever more pointless speeds.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Here's the problem 1.5Gbps download, 0.5mbit upload. Still takes you a week to send grandma a video of your childs first word because the uplink is unreasonable. May as well burn it to dvd and drop it in Royal Post.
The ISP's should be required to have uplinks that are no less than 1/8th of the of the downlink.
Think of it as a multi-lane highway. By adding more lanes you can send more cars down the road simultaneously. If there is only one lane, the cars will pass by one by one. Increasing Internet bandwidth simply means you can receive packets in larger chunks. It takes a single packet the same amount of time to arrive which is your ping. It's easy to understand why there is a misconception about "bandwidth == speed" because it takes less time to download large files if you're receiving several megabits per second rather than kilobits, but the time it takes for the packets to go from point A to point B is the same.
Sadly, most technology worker equate bandwidth with bitrates, even though they aren't the same at all. It depends on the encoding scheme. This was finally made clear to me when I learned about Huffman coding, and later, about Shannon's idea of "information". Tanenbaum has a gentle introduction in his Networks book.
Bitrates are rates, and so, in some sense they have to do with velocity. I'm OK with calling that 'speed'.
lying faster is now as/more important than just lying more often. the neogods' weapons peddlers' talknicians are just eugasmic over the expanded air time, & faster than the truth speeds.
disarm. that would free up immeasurable fast bandwidth right away, as the neogods' fabulous fibber talknicians could then take a break, or get down to the facts about the history of hymenism, &/or the 'jesus was a queer unemployed caveman who also had a girlfriend' rumors, which might help us all.
I think Speed is so ambiguous it should be applicable to bandwidth, otherwise we would be saying things like "Worlds Broadest Internet Service!" and use latency to describe the... uh.... network latency.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
um...
Data speed = Bandwidth
Lag = Latency
To complain otherwise is like bitching about someone using the term Baud instead of bit-rate, Who fraking cares
Wow, I hope we can get that in the US as well! Can you imagine how awesome it would be to be able to hit your monthly usage cap in 3 minutes?
You're talking of the difference between latency and throughput. Both latency and throughput are measures of "speed" and it wouldn't be wrong to talk of increased throughput as increased speed. It is confusing, however, to conflate throughput and bandwidth. Bandwidth is traditionally the measure of the signal band, measure in Hz, and is related, but not equivalent, to the throughput. I guess it's been confused enough over the past decade that the wrong usage of bandwidth can still be used, just like with the cracker/hacker debate.
bits per second has the same meaning if they march in single file or not, if your going to post you should have at least the faintest idea what you are talking about.
bps = bits per second
cps = cars per second
A road that carries 20 cars per second, still carries 20 cars a second if it has 1 lane or 8 lanes, unless there is some new math that I'm not aware of. lol
I've already got 1Gbps speed available to me if I should want it, which I don't, because 50 Mbps is more than enough for me now.
No, 1.5Gbps is data transfer speed. Binary data transfer speed. You normally measure bandwidth in Hz. You can use a lot of bandwidth to inefficiently transmit 1.5 Gbits per second. Or you can efficiently use your bandwidth to to transmit 1.5Gbps in under 1GHz or 1MHz or what ever. I think it's you the one who has it wrong.
I think it is pretty clear that they are refering to throughput when speak of speed in this aticle. As for latency the higher bitrate would likely help that a little because only one packet can be on the wire at any time.
Virgin Media throttles all but the very cheapest cable service between 10am and 9pm, divided into two blocks - 10am - 3pm and 4pm - 9pm. (http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management/traffic-management-policy.html/)
On the approx. £25/month 10Mbit plan I have I can download 3GB in the first period before getting throttled and 1.5GB in the second. If you go over the limits you get throttled down to 25% of max speed for 5 hours. It can be a little irritating to hit these caps but I don't think letting people download 4.5GB during the day and as much as they like at night is particularly bad - and the caps are higher for higher-speed services.
How many people downloading that much are downloading legal material, anyway?
The ps stands for "per second", it's a measure of something over time, which is a speed.
And here in Canada we top out at 16-24 Mbps.
Huffman coding has nothing to do with it. The bit rate on the wire is the rate for the compressed signal, not for the uncompressed signal. Let's say that Huffman coding or some other sort of compression reduces the size of a text file from 200 MB (1.6 Gb) to 20 MB. Then you add error correction codes to get ~25.0 MB. With header overhead, sending that file is sending ~27.2 MB. If it takes 145 ms for that data to get to its destination, that's a bit rate of 1.5 Gb/s, not 11 Gb/s. If someone includes any kind of compression (and yes, Huffman encoding is a form of compression) when they quote a bit rate to you, they're a charlatan. The bit rate on the pipe is about how many bytes pass over the pipe, not how many bytes the file uncompressed at the other end is.
On the other hand, as a basic, non-technical term, I'm ok with referring to "speed" and "bandwidth," as long as the person using it will never have any use for the Shannon-Nyquist equation.
Bandwidth (In the digital sense, not analog) is the rate at which data can be transmitted - specifically an arbitary string of bits. Speed is the fuzzy subjective thing which users experience and complain about. Bandwidth is one of several factors which determine the percieved speed, and thus the frequency of their complaints.
To be honest, as long as it's clear from context it rarely matters. Speed is a convenient term for anything that is measured in quantify per unit time and gives you the "fast"/"slow" vocabulary.
But their speed isn't changing. 20 cars going down a highway in 20 milliseconds are going at the same speed as 20 cars going down a highway in a single file. Each bit is going the same speed, but you are able to send more bits at once.
Try to avoid looking like a moron next time you post. By the way, it's "you're", not "your" going to post.
I downloaded over 15 gbs this weekkend on my virgin connection to get Portal 2 and The Potato Packs from steam. I also have downloaded well over 100gB of videos plus apps for my ipads and other devices.
1gb is not needed for consumers but for cloud computing real time.
Seriously? If 20 cars travel down the freeway in one second, in a single file, then they are traveling 20 times as fast as those 20 cars in parallel, if they travel the same distance in that same second. The only way you could speed up this caravan to the degree you refer to would be to have 20 high speed lanes (i.e. 20 network cables plugged into you monster of a NIC.
If you're insisting on referring to "speed" as distance/time, then yes, all the bits travel at kc, where k is slightly less than 1 through copper and 1 through fiber and c is the speed of light.
However, that usage of the word "speed" is not the one meant in this context, and in the realm of computing "speed" is generally accepted to mean "low-latency and/or high-throughput". This is a throughput.
I can understand your frustration with the word "speed" being thus appropriated, but that doesn't make the use wrong. There are many words in the English language that have become horrendously overloaded, and speed is now one of them.
i) What the hell does anyone need 1.5Gbit/s for, unless they are a business.
That's more than 50 HD video streams. Know anyone with 50 TVs? Maybe when full immersion holographic projectors are invented, you'll need that much for conferencing.
ii) For that matter, what the hell does anyone need their current top tier product for?
Apart from warez, of course. About the only answer I can come up with is more immediate delivery of videogames ; it took me 3 hours to download Portal 2 on my 10Mbit/s connection, and I had to wait until after 2100, or I would have been throttled back to 2.5Mbit/s after the first 750MB. 3 hours is mildly annoying, but I'm prepared to put up with that occasionally to save some money on recurring service fees.
iii) Because they don't invest in infrastructure, I don't get to use the service they advertise.
Sure, 10Mbit/s isn't the coolest new thing. But it sure would be nice to have it all the time. Now I'm back to doing things I hadn't done since the modem days, scheduling any big downloads to coincide with un-throttled periods (ie - the small hours of the night). If I need to download a DVD ISO (e.g. Knoppix) during peak hours? Tough underpants, all the people running torrents spoiled that because they didn't anticipate it (despite "downloading movies, music and games, faster than ever before" being the core platform of their marketing).
Bah.
Certainly is speed
Seriously?
If 20 cars travel down the freeway in one second, in a single file, then they are traveling 20 times as fast as those 20 cars in parallel, if they travel the same distance in that same second.
Correct. It would take longer than 20 milliseconds for my single-file cars to reach the end of the highway, since they are going at the same speed than my parallel cars, but using a single road rather than 20.
Ok, the article stated by combining 4 modems will get you 4 times the speed. Except that would require each modem to be on it's own 4 channel bonded system. As we all know cable single is distributed, so each connection isn't dedicated. They would require 4 docis3 head ends that connected to each modem. Currently there isn't funding in most areas to get 1 docis3 head end. Additionally this cuts into your cable channel lineup. Each digital stream is 6mhz wide and have 2mhz on each side to reduce channel interference. that means this will take around 160mhz (8mhz * (4 down stream + 1 up stream)) of your cable stream. Currently they are only able to use something around 10mhz to 1000mhz so that means you will only have 840mhz left for channels. If you think everyone is getting a dedicated 1.5Gbps that is a ways off.
A mod point for you. One most never forget that analog bandwidth refers to the size of the pipe, whereas digital bandwidth refers to the rate at which one can transmit bits. For example, your analog telephone operates in a wide enough band to allow your voice to be transmitted clearly. This band is a couple Kilohertz wide, and you may saturate the entire band at once depending on the range - such as if you try to play music. In the case of this story, the digital bandwidth is 1.5 Gbps - that is to say, 1.5 billion bits are transmitted across the link each second, in order.
The confusion is at least partially understandable - every Internet connection today still relies on having sufficient analog bandwidth to support a digital link. So long as we use photons and electrons for our connections, this will be the case.
If you live in a rural area, forget it, you have mobile GPRS / Edge if you are lucky.
If you want to actually use high bandwidth, forget it. They have so tight quotas per month you may aswell buy a cheaper option.
UK deserves no medals for broadband roll out, the government is a farce.
Fujitsu will do the job if they can get BT to open up their ducts and poles for not arm and leg prices.
The monopoly is cripling the country and should be forced in front of the EU anti competition commitee.
I'm with Virgin on their 30Mb/s package and looking at the advanced panel of the modem/router it looks like has multiple download channels that increases the speed.
Downstream Channels ....
Lock Status Modulation Channel ID Max Raw Bit Rate Frequency Power SNR Docsis/EuroDocsis locked
Locked QAM256 92 55616000 Kbits/sec 322750000 Hz 5.6 dBmV 43.9 dB Hybrid
Locked QAM256 89 55616000 Kbits/sec 298750000 Hz 6.6 dBmV 44.2 dB Hybrid
Locked QAM256 90 55616000 Kbits/sec 306750000 Hz 6.2 dBmV 44.6 dB Hybrid
Locked QAM256 91 55616000 Kbits/sec 314750000 Hz 6.0 dBmV 43.9 dB Hybrid
Unlocked Unknown 0 0 Ksym/sec 0 Hz 0.0 dBmV 0.0 dB Unknown
Unlocked Unknown 0 0 Ksym/sec 0 Hz 0.0 dBmV 0.0 dB Unknown
Unlocked Unknown 0 0 Ksym/sec 0 Hz 0.0 dBmV 0.0 dB Unknown
Unlocked Unknown 0 0 Ksym/sec 0 Hz 0.0 dBmV 0.0 dB Unknown
To use the all important car analogy, if you have a road where there are 10 cars passing every second, what speed are they travelling at?
You gave him a mod point, then commented to tell him you did this, removing all moderation points you gave out in this article in the process?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I work for an ISP. If someone is only getting 4Mbit out of their 30Mbit connection, we class it as "Slow speeds". If someone's getting ridiculously high pings, we class it as "high latency".
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Virgin Media will shortly trial 1.5Gbps cable Internet, but only to festering dot-com media cocks who live actually around Shoreditch itself.
"As the pace of technological change increases," said the ISP in the press release all the papers copied word for word, "it is vitally important to public health that these people have as absolutely much incentive as possible never to leave their homes. Wanking themselves silly over gigabytes of high-definition porn also reduces their likelihood of reproducing."
With the warmer weather, the Hoxton toxic waste pool has been growing and spreading, with reports of hipster infestations washing up as far afield as Hackney.
If the creative industries cannot be kept under control, by 2015 the entire population of Britain may be beret-wearing latte-sipping surrender monkeys telling you how much they just can't stand hipsters. Virgin Media is currently rolling out 100Mbps broadband to two million of the most endangered residential premises in the hope of effective quarantine.
In the wider world, high speed Internet will apparently let consumers access all manner of as yet nonexistent socially-redeeming services made of magic beans and pink unicorns, which actually means BitTorrenting a pirated movie in under five minutes. And hitting your download cap in another ten.
Virgin Media also announced that its overall revenue for the first quarter was up 5.7 percent to £982m, as a result of the utter lack of any connection between making money on a service and actually being able to provide it in a manner even slightly resembling reliability or competence.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Wait -- how many lanes does this road have?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
You're forgetting switching latency. A single high-end switch adds 600ns latency, and a single low-end switch adds 200us latency. If you have 20 hops, that's 12us vs. 4ms. And crappy wifi-routers can add 20ms of latency each. So, no, their average speed is not k*c where k is slightly less than one. One crappy wifi-router's latency is equal to light traveling 4,000 miles (more than the distance from NYC to London).
iPlayer's HD streams are only 3.6Mb/s, so even Virgin Media's slowest package can happily stream two of them at once. BluRay is typically about 30Mb/s, so 50Mb/s gives you a bit of head room and 100Mb/s goes above the maximum quality for BluRay, or lets you stream two BluRay-quality movies at once.
When I was doing my PhD, I had a GigE connection on my desk, which went to an Internet connection that was fast enough that I was never aware of the contention. The bottleneck downloading from somewhere like mirror.ack.uk was my laptop's hard disk. I learned to be wary of clicking on links to stuff there - data came so fast it filled up my RAM in a few seconds and then the machine basically froze until the download was finished.
Aside from stuff on ja.net, I rarely noticed a difference in speed between that and my home 10Mb/s connection.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Living in London...
and yet...
Can't get anything from Virgin Media except via my BT phone line.
I am surrounded by areas that have cable access and yet it is not available here, and every time I check there are never any plans to install it.
Just waiting for BT infinity to become available. This keeps slipping but at least I can be confident it will happen this decade.
speed == |velocity|
velocity == d/dx(position)
No sloppy seconds, for one, she said.
Please bring a connection to my house!!!!
sign my petition "Congressional Reform Act of 2011". http://www.thepetitionsite.com/31/congressional-reform-act-of-2011/
Like the beaver, it's just Dam one thing after another
...>1Gbit/s is currently not on the top of my list of residental broadband problems. Sure, more bandwidth is always nice, but there is a long list of issues that impact me more, like the crappy unreliable modems/home gateways that is provided by ISPs, the bufferbloat issues in them that cause latency to be intolerable, the lack of IPv6, the underprovisioned networks, etc...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Because some people don't have friends with accounts and/or more than one account.
We'll have this in the USA soon, with a monthly cap you can hit in about three hours. Then it reverts to a generous 56kbps (actual speeds may vary) for unlimited downloads.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
That's not the way to get laid, buddy.
With most users' data caps in Europe you'll hit your monthly cap in, what 2-3 hrs?
All I can tell from what you said is the road admits cars at a speed of 10 cars per second