News Virgin to trial world's fastest cable broadband

speed isn't everything.

get that backbone improved, and remove time period based traffic shaping. i want minimal lag in games, not speed.

if they say they are working on world's lowest ping connections, then that'd be much better. market 20Mbps uncapped fibre to gamers.

 

I want decent internet access in rural areas damnit. I don't give two hoots about 1.5Gb/s because I'll never get it. It's horrific when I have to change from the internet access I get away at uni and back to the crap I get at home.

 

Haha 1.5meg was the fastest I could have at my old house... Now were at a blazing 7meg.
Consider yourself lucky.
Seems America is behind the curve with internet speeds.

 

That.

The fastest service available to me is 'up to' 8Mb, and I consider myself lucky if it reaches 0.5Mb Mon-Fri evenings and weekends - often far, far slower. Like Matt, sometimes it drops so low it becomes effectively unusable, unable to even open a webpage or complete a speedtest. (And I don't live in a little village in a pimple on the arse-end of no-where either).

A shame, I used to live right round the corner to Old Street...

 

That's true, although after getting a new 2TB USB3 hard drive I got a letter off them asking kindly if I'd move all my 'heavy' downloading to 9pm-9am!

 

Only companys, schools and hospitals need that sort of bandwidth. I'm all for them getting out faster speeds though. I've got their 50Mb and it's brilliant, but I didn't upgrade to their 100Mb package when it became available as it is just unnecessary. For me anyway.

 

What the hell! hahaha, you must have been using some serious bandwidth The cheek though! I wonder who had to write it XD

 

They do cap download's on Virgin, I have a friend in student accommodation, he has been cut off before. The 50 Mb line is shared between 18 people in this case, so I can only imagine the usage is very high.

 

Ignoring many computers sharing 1 connection at the same time. How many people aren't going to realize that their internet speed is FASTER THAN THEIR NETWORK CARD can possibly receive at? I'm guessing that the answer amongst non techies is MANY.

 

I had this problem with Sky. They told me there was nothing they could do, but I switched to BT anyway and suddenly 2mbps at all times.

 

I guess it's initially going to be aimed at businesses

 

I've had 5MB/s off Steam once I think. The only way I can max out my connection is with NNTP.

 

they do cap the 50meg service if you use newsgroups. they throttle the bloody ports

 

Well, it is aimed at businesses, and I think the businesses that would opt for this service when it's available would be capable of ingesting large amounts of data, regardless of whether they need to store it or not. It's about bandwidth, not how much you can download and store.

And to the VM haters, I don't think they'd be capping a business service given the premium they'll have to pay for 'the fastest in the world'.

 

still waiting on 10 Meg

 

this is just data capping from the ISP

and no, they will not change that the only way to stop it is by changing ISP to one that doesnt cap data at peak times (IE after work)

 

I had the 50Mb/s service off them and it was **** anytime I actually had the oppurtunity to use it. We tried everything we could think of for the whole year we had it, and nthing improved it. And this is ignoring how terrible their customer service was when we tried to leave.

I have to agree with the comments here; they can big themselves up all they want, but until they improve broadband in rural areas, they are no better than the rest of them. I also agree with the latency comments. Their 50Mb/s service had horrible ping and jitter almost all of the time.

I would honestly sign up straight away if they had an Ofcom proven lowest consistent latency, 20Mb+ service. I would jump on it, regardless of how much I hate them.

 

They should be investing in increasing their coverage, not the speed. It is not just rural areas that are lacking fibre connections. More often than not it is the inner parts of cities that are most affected through lack of supply. I live in the East End of London about a mile from Liverpool St and there is no fibre services unless you go with BT's new 'Infinity' (Which I do not).

 

I'm surprised you had such a poor experience with the 50meg package. I hear generally positive things about that package, and my own experience has been perfect: 47Mb/s average speed and 16ms ping, with no downtime or throttling.

 

To be fair, it was terrible when we had it then. I was spending more time trying to see i i could fix the problem on my end than actually getting any use out of it.
This time round, we get the same problems occasionallly. But I honestly haven't noticed it in about 2/3 months now. They've greatly improved it, I'll give them that.