If fortune turns against you, even jelly breaks your tooth - Persian proverb
|
|
|
Virgin Media plans to double its customers' broadband speeds
BROADBAND PROVIDER Virgin Media has announced it will double the broadband speeds of over 4 million users in the UK.
The upgraded bandwidth, which will begin rolling out next month, will see a new top speed in the UK of 120Mbit/s, up from 100Mbit/s. Virgin Media said that subscribers to its 10Mbit/s through 50Mbit/s services will get at least double the speed.
Prime Minister David Cameron said, "I welcome this announcement from Virgin Media; it will provide a great boost for the economy and change the way many households, consumers and businesses use the internet. Rolling out superfast broadband across the country is a critical part of our plan to upgrade the UK's infrastructure and build a new and smarter economy."
Virgin Media said the upgrade will take around 18 months and will be completed by mid-2013. It added that the "ambitious initiative" will "catapult Britain into the world's broadband premier league".
The upgrade will be free for Virgin Media customers. It also supports the government's plan to ensure that consumers have access to high speed broadband by 2015.
Andrew Ferguson, editor of Thinkbroadband.com said, "Once the 18 month programme is complete, it means that around a quarter of Virgin Media customers will be meeting the basic speed requirement of 30Mb which is an EU target for 2020, many years ahead of time. Thus the news is good for UK broadband as a whole and should highlight that the UK is not the internet backwater sometimes it is portrayed as." µ
Tags: Internet
Share this:
Share
You know what Virgin? Improve your network quality instead of speeding it up. What the difference if you get 50 Mb or 100Mb when latency and jitter will not let you enjoy. Look into network overutilisation problem which has become a plague.
I've had 200mb in Finland's 5th largest city for well over 18 months now. It's crazy how such places in the UK are only starting to catch up to much larger countries with such smaller populations.
It would be ideal if the government created more competition and gives the broadband tax cash to smaller companies so that they can compete with the larger companies with their better ideas and service.
Another recent upgrade (XL from 20Mb/s to 30Mb/s) was also "free" ... except exisitng users had to pay for a new "super-hub" as the existing modems would handle 30Mb/s ... and then you ended up with a VM imposed firewall etc even if you had you're own and only wanted a modem ... I gather that you can now tell the "super-hub" to act as a modem only but that and the cost made me decide to give that "free" upgrade a miss.
I currently subscribe to virgins 50mb's and pay around 35 - 40per month. My average speed is around 45 to 50, so I dont quite understand the complaints about the service above. Im my opinion Virgin should be working on lowering costs and making super fast broadband more affordable than increasing its speed.
Why would they spend money giving us faster speeds that we don't need? I'd be happier if they could make their current system function correctly. Twice the speed of zero megabit is still zero megabit.
I'm a Virgin customer and am lucky if I can achieve 1MB speed ~ How about sorting people like us instead of those that already receive a decent speed.
With the speed caps and overpriced service currently on offer people will hit their soft cap twice as fast and end up paying more for it anyway. This is probably in response to BTs fibre service going out to other ISPs. They are masters of taking a word in the English dictionary like 'unlimited' and giving it a new definition!!
In what twisted universe does Posh-Boy Cameron believe that will help the economy. How will it change the way people use the Internet?
Oh wait he'll probably blame the economic state 'that we inherited from the previous Government' when it doesn't do very much at all.