Virgin to trial world's fastest cable broadband
Virgin Media's 1.5Gb/sec broadband connection is currently being trialled in east London.
Virgin is aiming for download speeds of up to 1.5Gbit/sec, although the upload speed is limited to just 150Mb/sec. Jon James, executive director of broadband at Virgin Media, explained the purpose of the project, saying: 'Demand for greater bandwidth is growing rapidly as more devices are able to connect to the Internet and as more people go online simultaneously.'
Another spokesperson for the company also added that 'these superfast speeds are possible because of the £13 billion of private investment made by Virgin Media, which means that every cable home is connected to a state-of-the-art fibre optic network by a high-grade coaxial line.
'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. This will not change for the overwhelming majority of homes eventually offered fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) services from other providers.'
The trial comes soon after Virgin was proved by Ofcom to offer the fastest average speed of any home broadband company in the UK. Its 50Mb/sec service has seen an uptake of more than 30 per cent in the first quarter of this year, with the total number of users on the tariff now standing at 150,000 with revenue up 5.7 per cent too.
What are your broadband speeds like? Do you like the sound of a 1.5Gb/sec connection? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyBut 1.5Gbps? Awesome! Who'll need traditional digital television? No one (in a few years) :P Everything will run off broadband ;)
I too have the 50MB package. It is fantastic. I have seen download speeds with Steam at 5Mb/s.
I paid triple what I pay for Virgin when in Italy, and a game would take 2 full days to download, but now it's under an hour - sometimes a lot less!
It's great for the online movies for Lovefilm.com, too.
I really want Virgin 50Mb (or even 20Mb) cable but I can't get it in my area.
The rest of us will be stuck on ridiculously slow broadband.
Change your steam download server to somewhere in Europe. I did that on my 50meg virgin connection and I sometimes max it out, I tend to bounce between Germany or Poland depending on whichever has the lowest load. The UK servers are some of the most busy.
I think the real value in this service is if you've got 2+ Power users" using the service, two people downloading from steam whilst watching uninterrupted iplayer HD for example.
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they dont cap 50Mb + ;) I downloaded 200GB the first day of having it :P
Cheers! I'll give it a go when I get in
I'll have to try that, too. I thought 5Mb/s download was good!
Unless you have more than 1 computer sharing the internet connection
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.
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!
What the hell! hahaha, you must have been using some serious bandwidth :P The cheek though! I wonder who had to write it XD
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've had 5MB/s off Steam once I think. The only way I can max out my connection is with NNTP.
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'.
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 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.
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.
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!
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
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....
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.
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
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, 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. 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.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1263197415.png
Vm are ok most of the time especially as they keep forgetting to bill me so I get a 50% rebate
I get better speedtest results when I go through the London exchange than I do with the local one
It's 187.5 megabytes per second, and the dude who said sharing internet connections was on the money.
I'd love to have this sort of speed. I bet virgin will still throttle the hell out of the upload speed mind.
No, it means your download will be cached in RAM before it's written to the drive.
My money is one them selling it with dedicated hardware EG a USB3 / Thunderbolt / PCI-E based dongle. Hopefully wireless based.
No point saying "But they don't exist"... neither does the 1.5Gbps package they're wanting to sell.
Either than or the router will simply have several 1Gbps sockets for sharing and/or bonding your 1.5Gbps.
Its time OFCOM kicked the door down at Vigin and got them to start improving the UK's broadband as a whole, they moan about BT OR duct and pole prices. Beyond 50 meg there will only be limited take up by residents, a expansion of there network would do more for the people wanting better broadband and give virgin more customers in the long term.
HD tech needs to develop first though - it gets faster but not by a considerable amount. Imagine an HD that has built in RAID 0 eg. data striped across the platters. Or multiple read write heads. I am developing the future, right here in the comments! :D
Also of course they aren't planning on one PC using the entire 1.5Gbps. As has been said this is a CORPORATE TRIAL. so there will be quite a few people using it simultaneously. By the time this hits residential, motherboards will have builtin 10Gbps Ethernet.
Or, I know plenty of consumer motherboards that offer dual LAN binding which would get you a 2gbps Cap.
Anyway, where I live in Australia I'd be more than happy for virgin to give me 50mbps cable. I'm meant to get 20, but am lucky to get 7... With 0.7 up.. I can't even host a minecraft server for more than 4 ppl.
I know from first hand experience and a phone call from a VM technical Manager.
I was on there 20 meg package had 4 different engineers out, new modems hours in phone calls. Then I got a phone call from them telling me that the lines were over subscribed and it would be 6 months until they could safely say it would be fixed.
I got 100 pounds compo and 12 months free Broadband and they stuck me on the lower package.
I decided to cancel this year after being with them since it was ntl and told them that they have gone to the dogs in the past few years. with bethere now getting 15 meg connection no capping at anytime of day wooot.
Yup, I know it's probably not a financially good idea for VM but it would be lovely if they extended their cable coverage to more remote areas. :( If I wasn't in uni halls at the moment I would be back on a "8Mb" connection that was so terrible I was regularly getting 4.5Kb/s.
When you say 7mb, 8mb etc per second, can you please mention it like this eg 1000kbps as this mean yours get 1mega byte per second.
So am i to understand all you lot out there are actually getting 7, 8, 15 mb per second on normal broadband i could believe this if its optical.
I only question it as im only 1km from our exchange max i get is 1mb per second, not that great, i suppose it will do.
Plesae explain if ive gone wrong, thanks
Actually my friend, unfortunately 50Meg is capped during peak times.
I cap out at 6.04mb/sec down speed during the non peak times but am throttled down to 3mb/2mb/1mb and 750k depending on how busy the day.
:'( and i pay £38 p/m for a throttled service.
With Virgin? We don't get throttled afaik, just random downtime at the moment.