News Virgin Media announces Vivid 200Mb/s broadband

At the same time, Sky launches 1 Gb broadband. Albeit to a 20,000 customer base.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...Sky-delivers-ultrafast-broadband-to-York.html

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

LOL, and Ryanair do flights.

 

And once again upload speed get neglected...

 

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.

 

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).

 

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

 

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

 

You can take VM broadband without a phone line, but it costs the same as it does to take the phone anyway

 

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...'

 

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.

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