Virgin Media to double the speed of customer broadband

liambalfour

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good news if you are with virgin, looks like i will be going to 20Mbs soon enough

BBC News - Virgin Media to double the speed of customer broadband

Virgin Media will double the speed of its broadband service for over four million of its customers, the company has said.

The upgrade, which begins in February, will also see the service's top speed increase from 100Mbps to 120Mbps.

The full roll-out is expected to be complete by mid-2013 at a cost to the company of £110m.

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, said the investment would be a "great boost" to the UK.

"I welcome this announcement from Virgin Media," Mr Cameron said in a statement.

"It will provide a great boost for the economy and change the way many households, consumers and businesses use the internet."

"Rolling out superfast broadband across the country is a critical part of our plan to upgrade the UK's infrastructure and build a new and smarter economy."

The government has set targets to improve the UK's broadband speeds considerably in the next three years.

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said: "Faster broadband speeds are great for customers and great for business, which is why our policy is to deliver superfast broadband to 90% of the country by 2015.

"Virgin Media's plans to double broadband speeds are really exciting and we applaud their ambition."

Last year BT announced it was investing £2.5bn to make fibre broadband available to two-thirds of UK premises by the end of 2015.

It promised significant improvements to most homes, while even faster broadband - around 300Mbps - will become available in certain "superfast" areas.

Free of charge

Virgin Media's upgrade will mean customers currently signed up for 10Mbps will be boosted to 20Mbps, while users on 20Mbps and 30Mbps packages will both be upped to 60Mbps.

Continue reading the main story

Start Quote
It means their subscribers can get their television, movies and songs even more quickly than they could before, which is obviously good news”
End Quote
Torin Douglas

BBC media correpsondent

Those on 50Mbps will be increased to 100Mbps. Customers already on the top 100Mbps tariff will be raised to 120Mbps - the fastest speed Virgin Media is currently able to provide.

The company said bandwidth usage limits will also be doubled to accommodate the increased speed.

Most customers will not notice the upgrades taking place, nor will any have to pay for the changes to take place, a spokesman said.

However, some users with old modems and other similar hardware will receive new up-to-date equipment free of charge.

Fernando Elizalde, a principal analyst from Gartner who specialises in consumer broadband, said he believed Virgin Media's investment in expanding its broadband capability was sound.

"In the last year and a half, multiple connections in the home and online video have caught up so much that it justifies having this high amount of bandwidth," he told the BBC.

"But there is still the question about rural areas. Virgin still cover mostly urban areas - they don't reach as many people in rural areas as BT and other telecoms providers."

According to Ookla, a company which uses monitors broadband speed tests across the world, the UK ranks around 35th globally when ranked by broadband consumer download speed - an average of 11.65Mbps.

Virgin Media say that when the roll-out is complete, that average could rise to around 16.46Mbps.

Based on Ookla's research, which gathers data from millions of speed tests, the increase would rank UK the 19th-fastest globally when compared to today's standards.

'Competitive advantage'

The BBC's media correspondent Torin Douglas said the service improvement will come at an opportune time as more bandwidth-heavy services like Lovefilm and Netflix, which launched this week in the UK, begin to start attracting larger numbers.

"It means their subscribers can get their television, movies and songs even more quickly than they could before, which is obviously good news," he said.

BT is investing in upgrading the UK's ageing and slow copper infrastructure
"But Virgin still hasn't managed to convince the majority of consumers that their system is better than broadband that comes down the telephone line."

"Until they do, they won't be able to establish a real competitive advantage."

Virgin Media's chief executive Neil Berkett said: "The internet has become an integral part of our social, work and family lives, so we think our customers are going to love this."

"As people are increasingly doing more online, and getting connected to the internet with lots of different devices, having a fast, reliable broadband service should not be a luxury."

"We want to make sure that consumers have access to the best value broadband service and that means a superfast connection."
 
* awaits inevitable complains about throttling/peak times/etc!!*
 
The 100 meg service still has a lot of issues and unhappy customers. Mine is OK most of the time except for excessive buffering while using bbc iplayer and tvcatchup.
I found the 50 meg was the mostly reliable for me.
 
* awaits inevitable complains about throttling/peak times/etc!!*


yes this is true but i pay for 20Mbps but when its being throttled with no othere downlaoding that day i get less then 1mb so they hav a long way to go as even at 3/4% throttling i should get 4 or 5 if my maths is rite
 
So does this affect everyone?

All customers on 10Mb will find themselves upgraded to 20Mb and people on 30Mb will find themselves on 60Mb and so on..?

Sounds good but having a 60Mb connection for 30 minutes a day is pretty wank IMO, I'd rather have a constant steady uncapped / shaped 20Mb than a super duper zippy speed that's capped after 30 minutes of full speed.

Yes I know I can use it at full whack all night, but I don't want to, I want to use it during the day.

Stick it up your arse VM.
 
Sounds like it will only be the 100meg customer that the upgrade applies to.
 
I want to use it during the day.

This is why i don't like this whole capping/throttling. Yes great I can get and pay for 100Mb, but I'm limited to when I can use it. No Thanks. I want to us what I pay for when I need, not when someone else dictates.
 
Sounds like it will only be the 100meg customer that the upgrade applies to.

How did you work that one out mate? :err:

Taken from the original Post....

Virgin Media's upgrade will mean customers currently signed up for 10Mbps will be boosted to 20Mbps, while users on 20Mbps and 30Mbps packages will both be upped to 60Mbps
.

I'm thinking I should downgrade to 20Mb since 20Mb customers are going to be upgraded to 60Mb same as the existing 30Mb customers.
 
I saw it on the VM forum this morning..

100Mb increasing 120Mb this summer

We've just announced that we're going to increase our 100Mb customer's speed to 120Mb while doubling our broadband speeds for our customers, you can read the announcement and FAQ here and if you've got any questions please post them to our speed doubling question and answer thread.
 
So does this affect everyone?

All customers on 10Mb will find themselves upgraded to 20Mb and people on 30Mb will find themselves on 60Mb and so on..?

Sounds good but having a 60Mb connection for 30 minutes a day is pretty wank IMO, I'd rather have a constant steady uncapped / shaped 20Mb than a super duper zippy speed that's capped after 30 minutes of full speed.

Yes I know I can use it at full whack all night, but I don't want to, I want to use it during the day.

Stick it up your arse VM.

They are also doubling the quotes so anything under 100mb will still have quotes but bigger
 
In response to Virgin Media's plans, BT said: "It is no surprise to see that Virgin are following our lead by doubling speeds.
"We announced we would do this for our fibre products last autumn and so they are trying to catch up with us."
BT's fastest currently available speed is 40Mbps.

But in terms of speed, BT are trying, but not succeeding, to catch up to virgin. :)

Personally because they are not doubling the 100mb speed I think a price reduction should be in order as we are getting the short end of the straw.

And to all those people that complain about the throttling/capping/call it what you want, ether suck it up, change your downloading habits or vote with your wallets and fook off to BT.

Everytime there a bit of news about virgin, 200 people chime in with the capping/throtteling thing. We fooking know already, they've been doing it for years, it's bout time to change the fooking subject.
 
The latest firmware allows the superhub to be turned into a modem only option and you can then use your own router rather than having it all in one.
 
What modems do VM use now? Just those Superhub things?

The way I read the article, they will update everyone to super hubs.

Now in the past, VM have always insisted on a site visit if you upgrade to DOCSIS3 equipment, I am pretty certain they won't be doing that any more.
 
I'm thinking I should downgrade to 20Mb since 20Mb customers are going to be upgraded to 60Mb same as the existing 30Mb customers.

I agree with this. It is unfair if you are on the 30mb already, as you will be paying more than the 20mb users. They must bump up the price of the 20mb users.....surely?
 
The way I read the article, they will update everyone to super hubs.

Now in the past, VM have always insisted on a site visit if you upgrade to DOCSIS3 equipment, I am pretty certain they won't be doing that any more.

It is self-install and phone activation now.
 
I agree with this. It is unfair if you are on the 30mb already, as you will be paying more than the 20mb users. They must bump up the price of the 20mb users.....surely?

The 20MB package doesn't exist now, it's "up to 30MB" and I think if you are on 20MB you're probably paying more than 30MB customers.
 
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