February 5, 200818 yr 50mb!!! I couldn't believe it when i saw this but Virgin Media are launching a 50mb Broadband service. It's currently had trials in Ashford, Dover and Folkstone which proved to be a success so Virgin plan to stretch into a wider customer base in late 2008! Virgin will also upgrade 4mb to 10mb aswell! 50mb though...I remember only a few years back thinking upgrading from 33.3k to 56k modem was a massive speed increase!
February 5, 200818 yr In my town, I'll be due to get this in about 2020 - took ages for broadband to come through!
February 5, 200818 yr Thing is that it all depends on if your phone line can handle that speed...at the minute I would say the majority can't. But yummie sounds like fun
February 5, 200818 yr Virgin also have horrible bandwidth restrictions. You may get 50mb, but if u download more than a few gig they slow you riiiight down!
February 5, 200818 yr Virgin also have horrible bandwidth restrictions. You may get 50mb, but if u download more than a few gig they slow you riiiight down! Yeah they call it Bandwidth Shaping which gets them around having to advertise it as restricted. It's advertised as unlimited broadband but then in the small-print it basicaly says that if a user downloads more than 3GB in a day (on the 20MB i'm on at least, which we get through a lot with 6 people on the same connection) then they are slowed down to supposedly 25% of their total speed. So I should get shaped to 5MB but it's much less, for instance playing games I get a ping of about 600 and downloads from usually quick HTTP servers run at about 20kbps. All in all NTL are a terrible ISP, but to be honest they're the best of the bunch, BT would be okay if they didn't give you the god-forsaken home hub which can't handle many packets at all.
February 5, 200818 yr Author Very interesting Cabbage... (saying that made me chuckle) Do you know how long the restriction lasts, say a user goes over their 3Gig limit once in 2 months...do they reduce the connection indefinitely..is it for a week... etc. Just wondered if you know this, lately i've download a few things using channel 4 On Demand..which i'm sure has taken me over quite a few Gigs..and have actually noticed a drop in speed... Hope it doesn't last too long!
February 6, 200818 yr Thing is that it all depends on if your phone line can handle that speed...at the minute I would say the majority can't. But yummie sounds like fun That is why Virgin Media are one of the best ISP's. The way they transmit data from the exchange to your house is through fibre-optic cable, so there is next to no resistance in the cable that is sending packets of information at the speed of light, as apposed to other ISP's like BT and AOL where they use copper cable. This makes lot of difference in speed the further you live away from the exchange. I have been a customer with Virgin Media (Telewest) for years and the speed is incredible.
February 6, 200818 yr I live really close to an exchange, currently on 8mb, but will be going to 16mb soon. Although 50Mb sounds great, i like to download more than 3Gb
February 6, 200818 yr In my (reasonably experienced) opinion you are all missing the biscuit with mainstream IP's. NTL, BT, Tiscali, Sky, AOL are all completely and utterly useless. Virgin media are the best of a bad lot IMO. It might cost you a few extra quid a month but with ISP's you really do get what you pay for. If you want a reliable, fast connection with great customer service you need Zen (my personal fave) or Eclipse or another one of the Pro services, especially if you play online games.
February 6, 200818 yr The only thing that comes with the speed is monitoring. They will monitor torrents and other activities. ill stick with my 10mb package.
February 7, 200818 yr It might cost you a few extra quid a month but with ISP's you really do get what you pay for. If you want a reliable, fast connection with great customer service you need Zen (my personal fave) or Eclipse or another one of the Pro services, especially if you play online games. Definitely, if you really want a rock solid connection, your going to have to pay a good price for it. For those who dont mind a bit of slowdown and cant afford paying lots, then the cheaper ones will have to do.
February 7, 200818 yr My phone line can only handle 6MB anyway. Oh well! Guess I'll just watch while everyone else zooms past me.
February 7, 200818 yr fwiw there are serious gov't talk going on about forcing BT to upgrade the lines to something more modern than the 1970's BT have been holding off doing this because of the increased competition it would bring them, but hopefully the majority of lines in the UK will be up to the most modern standards by 2015-ish, and sooner in many places. And 50 MB is all well and good, but the only time I need a ton of speed is when I am uploading.. also, bandwidth limitations?
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