News Virgin pledges 100Mb broadband for third of UK

Virgin Media has today announced that it will upgrade its network to 100Mb by mid-2012.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2011/11/03/virgin-pledges-100mb-broadband-for-third-of/1

 

Thats a hell of a lot of roads to dig up to manage even 1/3 of the Nation.
Or in other words, Virgin are making super fast broadband available in the larger urban areas.

 

Nice. The fastest in my area is currently 50Mb/s

 

Well, it will be the usual "up to" speed.

I have "up to" 50mb/s, but I'm lucky to get a tenth of that. Most the time it's below 1mb/s....

 

Well I get 50Mb all day, everyday. I don't do p2p or anything like that, so I'm probably the model customer.

 

Durd if you check the stats (and the article) you will see that Virgin are actual reasonably accurate with their speeds.

I'm on their 50mb connection at the moment and i vary from 46-52mb down and 3-4mb up.

 

Smeg that... I'd be happy with 5Mb cable broadband - they didn't bother to put it in my housing estate...

 

I find that's only true with ADSL connections. My 50Mb cable easily gets 49-50Mb/sec if the remote server can handle it. Steam, Dropbox, iTunes and my work's FTP server downloads at those speeds no problem.

However, the biggest problem with Virgin is their awful traffic shaping technology that kicks in during 'peak' hours (which is practically any time that isn't the early hours of the morning). It's meant to just throttle dodgy peer-to-peer connections, but is reality is effects so many legit services like Youtube, MMO's, Xbox Live etc. While it has improved over the last few months, it's definitely not something you'd expect on a premium broadband service.

 

This is a third of customers as i read it, not a third geographically so not as good as it sounds.

Still good news to some

 

I certainly hope that they install it in my street but after 11 years living in the north of Bristol (hardly a village) I keep being told they have no plans to come into our area!

Let's see how serious they are then...

 

The annual BS from Virgin, make it "end of 2012" and I'll believe it, they wouldn't even commit to putting cable boxes higher up on the walls (if you're on the first floor) to stop kids from kicking them out when they're bored, on the one occasion I was tempted by one of their offers, and it's irritating that they never include the phone line rental on their headline offers.

Every time they've announced a speed increase it's taken 18 months to two years, I gave up on them three years ago and they're still talking the same flannel even now.

 

So they continue to upgrade their existing network and those who can't get Fibre connections are still left with crappy ADSL2 that promises up to 20mb but I barely hit 3mb. Oh, and I live in the East End of London so it isn't just rural areas that are left behind.

 

Thank god for Virgin! After 3 years of hell with BT's lies and capping my line every other month after each time getting it uncapped I have just moved to Virgin three weeks ago. I went with the XL package and they guaranteed me 30mb. Each time I do a speed test it shows I'm getting speeds of between 29mb and 31mb. I can't ask for anymore than that, the service is brilliant. Hats off to Virgin for stamping all over rip off merchants BT!

30mb feels incredibly fast to me, 100 must be nothing short of amazing!

Thankyou Virgin

 

You'd think they'd start putting cable into the places that currently don't have the option of cable. There are so many housing estates and roads where I live where the cable service only goes to the entrance of a road. I'm literally 30 minutes from central London and not that rural i'm sure it's the same in other parts of the UK.

 

Same thing happened with my parents,
If you have the old grey NTL home box(pre2008) it cant handle the sync speeds, phone them up and get them to send you a brand new cable modem. My parents went from 2mb to 48mb

 

Why don't they concentrate on putting fibre for EVERYONE instead of increasing the speeds to ridiculous levels for the minority?

 

But what is the daily/monthly data cap?

 

Virgin, BT are as bad as each other, every time they announce a new speed or technology they "reset" the rollouts. So those who are already on high speed (20mb+) broadband get offered even higher speed whilst those on standard ADSL are left further behind in the dark ages.

BT might argue they do this due to demand, but there will never be demand for high speed broadband in non-high speed areas because people living there don't have a choice. Do virgin media even roll out to new areas anymore?

 

They keep saying we can get it but when I applied, after four weeks they decided they weren't going to dig the road up for the last 6 feet to my house and turned us down.. right after I'd already cancelled my previous ISP!

And still their postcode checker says yes!

 

I can't wait for Virgin's coverage to be more widespread, they've certainly earned themselves a good reputation as an ISP. One thing I really like is the absolute transparency they have on their website with regards to their policies on peak times, average speeds, what 'up to xxMBit/s' will actually work out as. +1 to any company who tries to keep the customers informed.