Virgin Promises 100Mbps Connections To UK Homes

registerShift writes "Virgin said it will roll out 100 megabit-per-second broadband connections to homes in the UK. The company said users will experience speeds 'very close' to what's advertised as it plans to deploy cable instead of ADSL used by competitors. 'There is nothing we can't do with our fiber optic cable network, and the upcoming launch of our flagship 100mbps service will give our customers the ultimate broadband experience,' Virgin Media's chief executive officer, Neil Berkett, said. This is just days after the FCC announced aims of 100Mbps by 2020, and companies panned it as unrealistic."

Missing words

[Rik Sweeney]

Virgin Promises Up To 100Mbps Connections To UK Homes

What you'll really get is something completely different

Re:Unrealistic?

[TheThiefMaster]

I'm on their 10Mb service and getting close to what they advertise. Specifically my cable modem is reporting that it is connected at 10240000 bits/sec.

I have seen downloads (normally from steam) hit 1.2MB/s.

Even better, my cable modem's uptime is currently 108 days 18h:11m:16s, my (admittedly custom) router's uptime is 107 days, 12 hours, 12 minutes. I've never seen an ADSL connection stay up that long.

Re:Unrealistic?

[matjeh]

I must be one of the few, too. I'm on the 50mbit service, and getting 50.1Mbit/s and 8ms ping according to speedtest.net. My 20Mbit service before was faultless, and also my 4Mbit service when I lived 90 miles from here (with NTL, before rebranded Virgin), and also my 2Mbit from my flat before that, and also my original 600kbit service in 2000 - and everyone I know on Virgin (and NTL before) has a similar story. (no I don't work for Virgin, just a happy customer)

Re:Unrealistic?

[jackharrer]

I've seen. Be Internet in London, around Stockwell. My uptime was the same as my Linux server - both shutdown when I forgot to top up electricity after 9 months...

Yes, it can happen, but most companies don't give a damn about that as most customers don't have a clue.

Re:Unrealistic?

[Anonymous Coward]

my cable modem's uptime is currently 108 days 18h:11m:16s, my (admittedly custom) router's uptime is 107 days, 12 hours, 12 minutes. I've never seen an ADSL connection stay up that long.

Virgin Media had a wide-area crapout for about 3 hours yesterday; my cable modem didn't reboot at all during that time. Uptime is not an indicator of connection stablilty!

Re:Virgin sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

on their 24Mbit plan, I would get no higher than about 200Kbytes per second, whereas on Sky I get around 800Kbytes a second on their 16Mbit plan.

You're talking about ADSL: Virgin offer ADSL in non-cable areas. Of COURSE you don't get the advertised speeds: ADSL is notorious for that. Those of us who live in Virgin Cable areas get much faster connections at the advertised speed: I'm paying for 20Mb and I'm getting 20Mb (& I checked the modem before I wrote that).

Basically your complaint is "ADSL is shit. I wish I had cable."

Re:Try getting my 20Mbit to run at speed first!

[Bad Ad]

you dont get traffic shaping on the 50mb package, only 10 and 20.

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html [virginmedia.com]

Re:Virgin sucks

[Tim C]

What I mean by this is, on their 24Mbit plan, I would get no higher than about 200Kbytes per second

24Mbps is an ADSL speed not a cable one, ADSL is notoriously poor because of BT's shitty telephone wires. Virgin cable broadband offers speeds in whole 10s of Mbps - from memory, 10, 20 or 50 currently. I have the 10Mbps service and get pretty-much exactly that; downloads speeds of 1.1MB/s or higher are the norm for me, not the exception.

Wrong

[Bad Ad]

you dont get traffic shaping on the 50mb package, only 10 and 20. so its unlikely they will shape the 100mb either.

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html [virginmedia.com]

Re:Unrealistic?

[OldBus]

As the replies to your post show (and I can confirm through my own experience), most people I know who are on Virgin cable DO get very close to the advertised speeds. It is ADSL providers who have problems. That is not to say there aren't problems:

• They cap heavily at peak times if you start downloading/uploading lots of stuff
• The fibre comes no where near the home. Virgin don't appear to be making any effort to fix this, even with some old decaying coax in certain parts installed by one of the providers they took over
• They don't appear to be extending their network at all - and I'm not just referring to rural areas. There can be parts of major urban areas that weren't cabled by the original companies that Virgin acquired, and nothing has been done since

Re:Unrealistic?

[Ash Vince]

I know if I contact them, they'll argue that it's my equipment (it's not - nothing has changed on my side of the network for a couple of years now), and they'll never admit to it being their problem...

You are probably right, but you imply you have not even tried. My advice is to try and contact them letting them know you have a problem.

They may be able to suggest a fix. It may be some weird conflict between your equipment and theirs so listen to any suggestions they make, try them, and if it does not fix it change it back. All this will cost you is a bit of time. If you do not have time to spare then change to a different supplier and see if everything works perfectly with them instead, just remember that they could be worse and you just locked yourself in to their service for a year.

I had a similar problem years ago with TalkTalk. They are certainly not the best ISP but they did confirm to me that the problem was at their end, and that they would be upgrading the routing into my local exchange in about 3 months time and that this would fix it. In about 3 months time, the issue was fixed at their end. I could have moved ISP, but it stopped being so urgent when I knew it was only temporary and I was too lazy to put up with the hassle.

Re:Unrealistic?

[petermgreen]

and any good torrent client
Are there any torrent clients that don't do that?!

BTW a quick tip, sometimes you will see one chunk keep failing. Usually that is because something is messing with the stream so if you see that issue turn on "encryption" (I put encryption in quotes because if you think you have any privicy at all when torrenting you are dangerously ignorant).

Re:100MB?

[petermgreen]

Heck, until PCI-E v3.0 is ready, that would saturate a 16x slot!
No it wouldn't, not by a long way! PCIe 1.0 has a raw bitrate of 2.5Gbps and a data byte rate of 250MBps (that's a capital B for bytes) PER LANE.

x4 would cover your uncompressed stream with room to spare (though in reality the netwok card carrying it would probablly be x8 since 10 gigabit is right on the theoretical max of 1.0 x4 and it's good to have some slack).