Virgin broadband will beat BT

So they'll be able to provide me with a 150Mb line for how long? 3 minutes before I get traffic shaped?

Robbing bastards the lot of em

Virgin Media need to concentrate on expanding the network instead of worrying about giving a minority 200megs!

Perhaps they should be concentrating on network reliability (as someone who's had a part time service for the past four days) before offering another speed that will never be achieved.

...that VM will actually be cabling up the urban areas that were missed during the first land-rush, or will this just be for customers of the existing infrastructure?

Virgin Media can barely supply 20 mbits. 50 mbits has had massive problems, and all their services are cut by 75 percent if you get traffic managed (20 minutes in the evenings). They are planning on adding more restrictions at the weekends (10 hours of 25 percent of the speed you pay for). Now they are talking about more headline speeds their overloaded and underinvested network cannot hope to supply in any reasonable sense.

It's just sour grapes and spoilers from VM because BT is investing in infrastructure and VM isn't (too busy cutting costs and staff to try and sell themselves to someone else). In a couple of years the DSL suppliers will have a nice shiny new fiber network, and VM will still be trying to con their customers whilst refusing to improve services or update their network.

VM can't reliably supply 10, 20 or 50Mb. Their network is massively oversubscribed and crawls to dial up speeds on an evening.

They've had to implement STM to cap all users after ~30 minutes continuous use.. says it all.

How about they make an announcement to the effect that they're going to support their current customer base, something they appear to have forgotten about. 300Kb/s for six months does not a 10Mb/s connection make!

Chancers, liars, masters of misinformation and deception. Welcome to Virgin Media.

Virgin fail so utterly at providing adequate bandwidth for all their customers as it is, how on earth can anybody take them seriously when they come out with marketing rubbish like this? If they could actually provide a 20Mb service without ridiculous limits and caps they might be worth considering. However they can't even do that and even when your service isn't being capped their network is so horribly overloaded in some areas that 20Mb customers frequently get reduced to little more than dial-up speeds in some areas.

Woohoo! They're rolling out even faster services and those trialling them aren't subject to the same usage limits as other customers. Wait until everybody else suffers even slower speeds on their network due to this and that won't even compare to what happens when they offer it to everybody and suddenly it'll all be capped and restricted again.

I pretty much get the full amount of bandwidth that VM promise, except obviously I get throttled for ages if I use it for more than a few minutes.

I would guess the guys above who see near dial-up speeds were originally on NTL? I was on Telewest and their network has always been excellent for me... until they became Virgin Media anyway...

I might be moving house soon, but I won't be using VM where I go next unless I've really got no alternative.

...it's not a "time based" cap like you are all alluding to, its a download cap. So, you're downloading more than 3GB between 4-9pm. Play it smarter then! You can download 6GB between 10am-3pm, and 3GB between 4-9pm. The rest of the day is uncapped. So, on 20mbit you can download 8.5GB/hour. As 3-4pm is UNCAPPED, that means between 10am-9pm, you can download 17.5GB. That's a lot of data. But then you can go crazy 9pm-10am, which is 13 hours of 8.5GB/hr, or 110.5GB over night. So, in any 24 hour period, you can easily download 128GB, or nearly 900GB a week. Stop whining you pansies.

JD also mentioned that they are adding more restrictions at the weekend, without mentioning that they starting this cap an hour later and increasing it, and are removing the morning cap during the week! So on the proposed traffic management, you would be able to download:

Weekdays: 9pm-4pm @ 8.5GB/hr = (161.5GB + 3GB [night cap]) x 5 = 822.5GB.
Weekends: 9pm-11am @ 8.5GB/hr = (110.5GB + 7.5GB [w/end cap]) x2 = 236GB.

Which totals (OK, it's not entirely accurate with the hours at the weekend) about 1050GB a week, which is more than the equivalent of 8 days downloading on the present system. Now, I download a lot (14GB of TV shows just today) and I can't fill a terabyte a week. You guys would seem to the people that ARE taking the piss, and exactly who these caps are aimed at.

Given that Virgin aka Telewest/NTL and all their other names they have gone through, haven't invested anything in expanding their network in the past 20 years, I can't see BT being at all bothered...

Apart from in Chelmsford, which for some reason BT have chosen for one of their early roll outs, even though they already have the cable option...

Jesus what a pointless waffle, unfortunately it doesn't address the fact that you can't do what you want when you want, despite their advertising claims.

"You guys would seem to the people that ARE taking the piss, and exactly who these caps are aimed at"

Nope, I'm just an average user who likes to use his connection when it suits me and at a time when the rest of the planet isn't in bed.

The caps are in place because Virgin simply don't have the bandwidth or network investment capacity required to support their current customer base.

Eff them all to hell. Capping, shaping, forming, modems that die after three months, ropey TV quality, shoddy support, and backhaul bandwidth equivilent to an ant dragging a floppy disk.
Effing Effers.
I'm happy to wait a couple of years for BT to upgrade the infrastructure if Virgin are my only other option.

Seeing as both Virgin Media and BT intend to implement Phorm, neither will be getting my money.

They have enough trouble supplying their current users with 10Mbit/sec let alone 150Mbit/sec.

Current Traffic shaping rules mean that (on a 24hr average) a 20Mbit Virgin Media line is more like 7Mbit!

I'm in a new build flat in the centre of Portsmouth. Not exactly a minor town, but I can't get cable to my flat *at all*. I'm in a CITY. I'm SURROUNDED buy the cable network.

And even if they could be bothered to cable up anything build after 1993, why would I want their *JOKE* of a service?

For anybody living in Portsmouth, try NewNet ADSL2+. I get a real, unshaped, uncontested, uncongested, uncapped 5.5Mbps. It might not be the fastest connection in the world but the customer service and service reliability is second to none.

Since purchasing my line, I've twice had my bandwidth allowance upped for free. 4 to 6 to 8 (I have the low usage cheapy cheapy line)

Virgin's 50Mbps is not capped. Their bandwidth management policy does not apply to it.

I get the advertised speed, and I get it anytime of the day. They recently reduced the cost of the 50Mbps package to £28 a month too down from £35.

Source
http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php