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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."
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.
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.
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.
Simple, it scales holistic infrastructures and engages cross-platform partnerships to generate vertical web-readiness and incubate frictionless bandwidth, which targets interactive markets and cultivates collaborative portals.
(Courtesy of the "Web Economy Bullshit Generator")
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.
You forgot to add synergy in there
SSC
Steam users, I imagine.
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.
Virgin doesn't charge for going over their limits. They publish their traffic management policy (currently no caps on their 50Mb/s service, and ones that I've rarely hit on their 10Mb/s one). If you go over the caps, which only apply at peak times, then you are throttled for 5 hours, and then your connection resets to the normal speed after that.
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