Simply incredible
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Virgin Media to demo 200Mb broadband
INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER Virgin Media is set to showcase its 200Mbps broadband service at the Ideal Home Show in London over the next week.
Of course it's going to be a while before the majority of customers to get access to such a service, but the company has been trialling it in Kent since last year, with additional trials just starting in Coventry.
The company will also be showing off some of the stuff people who have one of these magical connections will be able to do, including streaming 3DTV and other content to multiple devices all around the home and on an array of gadgets.
According to Virgin, the 200Mbps connection will allow a user to download a music album in just three seconds, meaning it'll take just nine seconds for you to break the incoming three strikes rule and have the connection suspended. Perhaps that's how Virgin is hoping to deal with the contention issue once the service becomes more mainstream.
If you're in the area and you'd like to see the demo for yourself, you can pop along to the show at Earl's Court any day between 20 March and 5 April. µ
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As a satisfied 20Mb cable customer (my connection peaks at about 22Mb), I'm surprised by Mr Mogul's comments about a 2Mb service which doesn't even appear as an available cable speed on the Virgin Media website. Presumably he is using ADSL, which shows why cable is better!
Dunno about you lot but i pay for 50 and get 50, rarely does it bork out on me and I've never seen it drop below 45.
Why can't they be reasonable and work on getting 2 Mb sorted before 200Mb?. It would be nice if I could get more than half a meg on weekends and peak times.
That's it Virgin, show the world your flaccid e-peen for the world
There is no real current need for this level of speed for residential use. I guess if you are watching 5 o 6 simultaneous HD streams it makes sense but otherwise it is overkill. It may even be overkill for full speed telecommuting since most corporate desktop LANs do fine with 100Mb.
In Portugal we got 200 mb service a year ago..we have 1 Gbit service in some places for 6 months :) (oh.. its symmetric..)
Capt TickTock,I guess you're right. I'm one of those old fogeys who tends to forget about things like MP3s. To me an album is still CD-sized (or even vinyl - but let's not go there).
Apologies to Virgin if I got it wrong.
I still prefer the 1600Mb/s hypothesis though. Now that would be worth having (if we could find anything that could keep up)!
Here in Helsinki our cable operator Welho started of 200Mb speeds few weeks ago with very visible campaigns (trials started in Jan).
I have had the pervious 110Mb/5Mb speed for 19 months now and at it has really worked at the full advertized speed to Finnish sites.
When they get my 50mbps working without going fubar after a couple of weeks, then they have something to crow about. At one point, I was getting free broadband, as it is, getting 2 weeks service refunded.
The album could be in mp3 format, in which case it will be a lot smaller than 600MB (60-70MB) so 3 seconds is doable, no?
Until your bandwidth gets throttled...
As Bill points out in the prior comment, Virgin's infrastructure is totally overloaded as it is. We have a 10Mb connection and only ever see anything close to 10Mb at silly o'clock in the morning. Every other time of day we get somewhere between 3Mb and 5Mb if we're lucky.
200Mb? How about you actually deliver the 10Mb we're paying you for now, Virgin?
We have a Virgin Media connection in Bristol (BS6) with 10Mbps bandwidth. The service is completely overloaded at the exchange level and they rarely supply more than 1Mbp/s during 3pm and 11pm. In many cases the connection is totally unusable, dropping up to 50% of the packets. A quick google search reveals many other people have the same problem. Until they can sort these problems out I would much rather they reduced the per person bandwidth by a factor of ten rather than increasing it so they stand a much better chance of providing a usable service. Currently it is a joke.
Sounds like someone at Virgin doesn't know the difference between bits and bytes.
If an album is 600MB (MegaBytes), then it will take a 200MB/s (MegaBYTES per second) connection to download it in 3 seconds, not Virgin's 200Mb/s (MegaBITS per second) offering.
... or could this be a hint that Virgin's 1600Mb/s service is in the pipeline ???