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News Virgin Media announces Vivid 200Mb/s broadband

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Gareth Halfacree, 29 Sep 2015.

  1. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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  2. yodasarmpit

    yodasarmpit Modder

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  3. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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  4. DriftCarl

    DriftCarl Minimodder

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    It is nice to see a broadband company improving customers connections without being forced to by a regulator.

    VM have constantly boosted customers broadband connection year on year without additional charges.
    They could have easily offered this 200mb/s connection as a new tier above the 150mb/s and charged more for it, but instead they decide to upgrade those already on the highest tier to the new one, then bump up those on lower connections also.

    So by the end of the year I should go to 50 meg to 70 meg.
     
  5. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Source? The press release talks about opting in to the upgrade, but nowhere did it say the upgrade was going to be free...
     
  6. Corky42

    Corky42 Where's walle?

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    Not sure how people want to interpret the following, but a post on the VM forums suggests it's still going to using DOCSIS 3.0 and their store page on the upgrade.
     
  7. Mr_Mistoffelees

    Mr_Mistoffelees The Bit-Tech Cat. New Improved Version.

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    Would be nice to have the option of cable but, Virgin are not interested in small villages.
     
  8. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    link

    and slightly more vaguely from Virgin themselves here.

    No mention of a price bump [though no doubt that'll come a few months later when everyone's forgotten about it all].

    Like the last round of speed bumps you technically had to opt in, though in reality you had the chance to opt out of the upgrade.

    Their uploads speeds [even if they are supposed to improve this round] are still **** though.
     
  9. Hustler

    Hustler Minimodder

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    Years ago I had Virgin fibre and you'd get decent speeds for a couple of months followed by 3mths of really lousy speeds that made 56k seem fast, due to the fact they'd overload the local routers with new customers without upgrading capacity.

    ..only when they'd receive enough complaints would they bother to increase capacity, which would work for another couple of months, so on and so on.

    It's why I'm reluctant to ditch my BT FTTC service, despite Virgins 150Mb service being an option for me as I suspect I'd still have the same problem with them. Yes the BT service is slower at 60Mbs down, 8Mbs up, but it never gets overloaded, and during peak times ping times stay below 20ms, and lets face it, 60Mbs is more than fast enough to download anything off Steam in less than 2hrs and for 4K streaming when it arrives big time.
     
  10. Teelzebub

    Teelzebub Up yours GOD,Whats best served cold

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  11. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Cheers for that. I'd take the ISP Review post with a pinch of salt - they said 300Mb/s for a start, and that turned out to be wrong - and the Virgin Media page makes no mention of whether the upgrade will be charged. Certanly, VM has offered free upgrades in the past - but the fact that the new offerings have an entirely new name, Vivid, may be a precursor to charging (oh, we're not upgrading your existing connection; we're shifting you over to Vivid, a new product, and that'll cost you £X a month more.)

    Fingers crossed it's a freebie, though - and that it brings a boost to upstream bandwidth, too, though I fear that may have to wait for a proper DOCSIS 3.1 rollout.
     
  12. Anfield

    Anfield Multimodder

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    And once again upload speed get neglected...
     
  13. Parge

    Parge the worst Super Moderator

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    I'm not saying that I'm expecting it, but Virgin upped my speeds from 120mb to 152mb for free, so I wouldn't be surprised if they did it again.
     
  14. bawjaws

    bawjaws Multimodder

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    I've been with VM (and Telewest before them) since 2004, and my initial connection was 2MB broadband. I'm now on 60MB and I've not upgraded my package or been asked to pay for faster speeds (other than normal inflationary increases, of course).
     
  15. bionicgeekgrrl

    bionicgeekgrrl Minimodder

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    the other downside to Virgin's offerings being their traffic shaping for peak hours, which if you hit their limits in the peak can extend right through the night from past experience on a go slow.

    Not able to get VM where I am, so best I can get is plusnet fibre at 56Mbps.

    One day BT might give up on copper and start upgrading their network to be more fibre to the home, but probably not for 100 years ;)
     
  16. DraigUK

    DraigUK Minimodder

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    I can't really complain about my VM connection, I don't even know what speed it is at these days but it is over 100Mbps.

    Minor complaints from me (but nothing major) would be having to reboot the router every couple of weeks as the speed slows down over time and then a reboot of the router clears it out and the speed is back right away, and I would love to have just the broadband from them without the useless phone line I never use, as has been mentioned the upload speeds are pretty bad, which holds me back from using Twitch at times...but nothing I can't live with.

    Certainly better than the options that used to be available to me when I lived in the sticks :D
     
  17. bawjaws

    bawjaws Multimodder

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    You can take VM broadband without a phone line, but it costs the same as it does to take the phone anyway :D
     
  18. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    For us it was actually cheaper to take the TV/BB than the BB on its own...


    @Garath, I think because VM haven't stated either way everyone's going with 'free unless they say otherwise', whereas you've gone for the more cynical [but probably better view to have] 'it's not free until they say it is...'
     
    Last edited: 29 Sep 2015
  19. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Cynical? Me?!
     
  20. Kovoet

    Kovoet What's a Dremel?

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    Here is me about to see what sky and bt offers. Been with virgin a long time buy paying way too much. So contemplating others providers.

    Sent from my HTC One M9 using Tapatalk
     

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