Uk News - Virgin Announce 50meg Connection Roll Out

[GhostShip]

Plenty of speed to go around it seems if your a Virgin customer, lets read the details ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7776139.stm

Virgin Media has launched its new 50 Megabits per second (Mbps) domestic broadband service. It doing so it will be the first UK ISP to roll out a next generation broadband service that runs far faster than most others available to UK web users.
The new 50 Mbps service will cost £51 a month, although this is reduced to £35 if users also take a Virgin Phone line for an additional £11 a month.

The service will put Virgin at the top of the speed league for UK ISPs. Close behind is Be Broadband which offers at 24Mbps service for £17.50 per month.
The details of the service were released during a press conference on 15 December. Trials of the high-speed service were carried out in Kent during 2008.
The service will be rolled out country-wide over the next six months.

Not everyone is convinced that the cable modem technology on offer from Virgin Media will be enough to satisfy speed-hungry consumers
"The main issue is speed. While FTTH can easily deliver speeds of up to 100Mbps and could eventually pump out 1000Mbps, Virgin's service offers 50Mbps and is asymmetric. "This means that uploading content will be much slower than download speeds."

With the companies debts frozen for a year Virgin are taking a big gamble and its likely to pay off if they get this right, people are demanding more from their net connection these days and if Virgin can deliver on the majority of its claims we will be seeing many happy faces in the future, of course many wonder why Virgin are offering such speeds when the current reality is that when some of their customers try to use the service they have paid for they are throttled, this is something any potential customer should be aware of and research before signing on the dotted line.

[']['affy]

whats point in this speed if the isp throttles you so badly it all just another gimick to say look i'm the best come and beat me.

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Pity they cant concentrate on coverage before they start rolling out gimmicks to confuse customers even more.... what i dont get is if they are going to offer such a crash hot deal why are they still advertising long term deals at a slower speed and high price such as £29 a month For the first 12 months, then just £36 a month after that on a 18 month contract for up to 20 meg, when in reality most people have no hope of even this speed as they are on copper wire.

[GhostShip]

Here is the side of the matter Virgin wont be mentioning very much.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/16/virgin_bittorrent/

The UK's second largest ISP, Virgin Media, will next year introduce network monitoring technology to specifically target and restrict BitTorrent traffic, its boss has told The Register.

The move will represent a major policy shift for the cable monopoly and is likely to anger advocates of "net neutrality", who say all internet traffic should be treated equally. Virgin Media currently temporarily throttles the bandwidth of its heaviest downloaders across all applications at peak times, rather than targeting and "shaping" specific types of traffic.

The firm argues that its current "traffic management" policy allows it to ensure service quality at peak times for 95 per cent of customers while still allowing peer-to-peer filesharers to download large amounts of data.
The details and timing of the new application-based restrictions are still being developed, Virgin Media's Kiwi CEO Neil Berkett said in an interview on Monday following the launch of his firm's new 50Mbit/s service. They will come into force around the middle of next year, he added.

A company spokesman later declined to provide more detail on the CEO's comments.

A great u turn then folks as this article makes clear this is the same company that only 4 -5 months ago said there would be no application based throttling as this is, I think we can all see why Virgin does not need our custom, in its eyes p2p users are folks who somehow are not paying for their service despite the fact that it was Virgin who sold them that service and the commitments that came with it.