News Virgin to trial world's fastest cable broadband

If I got a virgin 10mb I would be over the moon. I live in a county town in a fairly good area and can only get 4mbs on a good day. I try not to complain because the very fact I can access the internet at all is fantastic, but each time an article like this comes out I feel so left behind

 

i have virgin's 50mb/s package in my student house, there are six of us in the house and a lot of people in the area with virgin routers. despite all this since taking up the package in september i have not once experienced any noticeable lag in any online games which cant be traced back to a problem with the game's own server. the one problem i have had is that every few days we are knocked off for a few hours at a time, after calling them i found out this was only due to them not expecting so many people in the area to take up their packages and it should be fixed shortly.

I have consistently been impressed with their current speeds (whenever i've checked it out its been from 20-45mb/s), more speed from their service is very welcome. THE FASTER THE BETTER!

 

Virgin media are positively the worst isp in the uk many of my friends and indeed myself at one time are and were connected online with them and are/were having had many connection problems,the excuse from virgin is distance from the phone exchange this is bs as one of them has his house connected by only a walls distance to the exchange,he is paying for 50 meg and only getting at most 2-5 meg and downloads very little hes that close to the exchange if he places his hand through the wall hes touching it. virgin media are useless in my opinion, we have bskyb max package and can honestly say they are the only ISP I have come across that truly understand the meaning of the word unlimited

In our time with sky broadband we have never gone below 18 meg even at busy times and most times always get what we pay for,I personally would rather have the slower 20 meg connection of bskyb than go with virgin media again

 

Basically Virgin Media is very hit and miss. For some it is brilliant, and for others it is awful. But if it wasn't for them I doubt BT would be offering cable and trying to compete. They would still be sitting back doing nothing.

 

urgh double-post fail

 

We have to constantly reset the router and the modem, i'd say if it's not one then it's the other, but sometimes it's not either of them.

 

Same position as you:

Home: unlimited, but it's 2Mb.... Ugh

Uni: Something amazing like 10 MB (yes that's bytes), but capped at 10GB a week....

 

I have the 50mb service since it launched.

It's been spotless, I can hammer pretty much any service and max it out, hosting companies are wising up and starting to cap there outgoing bandwidth (we do it at least)

Virgin do cap the 50mb service something like 9am-12pm is capped for NNTP and p2p services, there is no disconnect and other traffic still flows at full whack.

 

i thought the exact same thing. on top of that, most websites around the world wouldn't offer that much speed.

 

That's what I was wondering... are there any details as to how the potential 1.5Gbps would be attained? Enterprise ethernet gear provided for home users? I doubt it, though happy to be proven wrong.

 

you could buy yourselfs some expensive 10Gb cards

 

Your friend either isn't on 50mb or isn't getting the speeds he's been telling you, 50mb is fiber optic so where the exchange is makes no difference

 

unless he is not on virgin fibre, but on virgins rent from bt service. he wont be getting 50Mb on that thought

 

the not so super hub has got issues still (i am quite lucky the Vm man still had an 50mb modem in the van)

it is true about news (i guess ip based) and un-encrypted torrents connections can be heavy limited depending what the whole network has been doing (vpn only fix for it or goto business bb) just wish they had not done that at least that gives me an good reason to stop tv services completely

 

It says in the story: This is being trialled for four companies, it's not for home users, therefore it'll be enterprise grade kit they'll be using anyway.

Also, veering off opic (only slightly), but I see South Africa have just doubled their internet capacity with a new cable to London - the West Africa Cable System (WACS). How does 500 gigabits per second sound to anyone? You could download a DVD in 0.002 seconds!

 

"By contrast, BT’s infrastructure remains reliant on copper telephone wiring, or in some cases even more inferior aluminium, which was never intended to supply broadband. "

By contrast, Virgin can afford to push all its cash in to headline grabbing stunts because it has no mandate for the betterment of the UK as a whole, relying instead on cherry-picked regions of the UK to fluff the Board of Directors and its other various shareholders.

You can call BT for all you want, but at the very least, and regardless of privatisation, they have been serving some of the most rural parts of the UK for a long time. If Virgin really want to play with the big boys they better gtf up my street, and the thousands of others they refuse to invest in.

Meanwhile I'll take my crappy 200kb/s from BT and say thank you for maintaining a clean, reliable service. And I will continue to use my excellent O2 3G service to supplement my bandwidth. STFU Virgin.

 

At which point the TV licence will become the PC licence... go figure.

I think I need new shorts at those speeds though.

 

1.5Gbps really is something! But there are a couple of things I don't like here.

1. The upload speed. Sure, it's not AS important as download speed for most people, but a tenth of the speed? Seriously?
2. Coaxial, not fibre. This is a potential speedbump for some people, although I guess (hope) they have this problem mostly settled by now. Haven't paid that much attention to all the technical stuff lately, so I wouldn't know.
3. Download cap, wtf. Haven't had that since dial-up 15 years ago.

Norway is cold all year round, it's the most expensive country in the world, and the people here are generally unfriendly, but if there is something I really like about living here, it's the internet. We never have less than our promised 40/40mbit (sometimes more, see below), fibre optics all the way into our walls, no download caps whatsoever, and we live over 60km from the nearest city.

Yeah, and the company we get our internet from, just did this.

 

I'm old enough to remember 300baud dialup and BT's refusal to roll out new technology or even make adsl available to villages so avoid them like the plague
Vm are ok most of the time especially as they keep forgetting to bill me so I get a 50% rebate

 

Still though I love how a lot of these companies are offering high speeds but then download caps. Look for example at the new 105mb from Comcast in the states. It is a few hundred per month and capped at 120gb. Totally worthless, I would get it to transfer files for work but the cap makes it worthless. Instead your best off having multiple lines so you can get around the caps.