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Virgin Media UK Pilots 200Mbps Broadband Speeds
Posted by
timothy
on Wed May 06, 2009 01:00 PM
from the quickly-now-quickly dept.
from the quickly-now-quickly dept.
MJackson writes "UK cable operator Virgin Media has announced the first real-world customer pilots of up to 200Mbps broadband services using DOCSIS3 technology from Cisco, which could make it one of the fastest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the world. Following successful lab trials, the 6 month long pilot started last week in Ashford, Kent (England), and will ultimately employ 100 customers in the testing process. The pilot will, among other things, test future online consumer applications, including High Definition Internet TV (HD IPTV) and the ability to deliver applications and support for home IT needs through its network. By comparison J:Com in Japan supplies broadband at up to 160Mbps and Cablevision in the US supplies broadband at up to 101Mbps. Like Virgin Media, both companies use DOCSIS3 technology for broadband over cable networks."
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Submission: Virgin Media UK Pilots 200Mbps Broadband Speeds by Anonymous Coward
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News: Virgin-Universal Deal Offers Unlimited Music, Goes After File Sharers 254 comments
suraj.sun writes "The UK's Virgin Media could start suspending persistent file sharers on a temporary basis, using information provided to it by Universal Music. The ISP announced on Monday that it would, before Christmas, launch an all-you-can-eat music download service for its users, based on a monthly subscription fee. The tracks will all be DRM-free. 'In parallel, the two companies will be working together to protect Universal Music's intellectual property and drive a material reduction in the unauthorized distribution of its repertoire across Virgin Media's network,' a statement read. 'This will involve implementing a range of different strategies to educate file sharers about online piracy and to raise awareness of legal alternatives. They include, as a last resort for persistent offenders, a temporary suspension of internet access.' DTecNet has already been working with UK content companies for some time to do much the same thing, and is also working with RIAA in the United States."
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Stop it! (Score:5, Funny)
Anyway, my point is this. Stop bragging, you're seriously making me want to stab my eyes with grapefruit spoons.
Re:Stop it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry, if it's anything like any other Virgin product then the throttle to 1Mb/s will kick in after 5 minutes. And as for BitTorrent, yeah right...
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Lets see, excessive use of 50GB would only take a little over 34 minutes to reach!
Re:Stop it! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. ISPs can invest in all the technology and great-sounding packages they like, but while they have throttling at arbitrary and unspecified limits that consumers cannot find out then their offers amount to precisely fuck all squared. I'd gladly take any 2Mbps unmetered ISP that guarantees no limits and no metering, over any 8Mbps service, or even a 100MBps service. Broadband is about having a reliable, always on connection that I can trust to be there, and can predict the capacity of, not about having some ultra-fast thing that can't be used.
Parent
Re:Stop it! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, but Youtube, for whatever reason, still buffers for 5 minutes.
I'll make an insightful comment once the rest of this page finishes loading on my connection...
Parent
Re:Stop it! (Score:4, Informative)
Virgin Media are so bad they almost make BT look good. Almost.
Stop bragging, you're seriously making me want to stab my eyes with grapefruit spoons.
At least you still have grapefruit spoons. They are no longer sold in the UK, due to health and safety concerns over people cutting their mouths (I honestly wish I was making this one up - you can still find them in second-hand shops, but good luck finding new ones).
Parent
Re:Stop it! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Stop it! (Score:5, Funny)
So, wait.. how do you eat grapefruits?
You out-source the cutting to a country which doesn't treat you as a 2 year old kid and then simply import the remaining juice ;)
Parent
I'm ethically opposed after watching a documentary (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Stop it! (Score:5, Funny)
So, wait.. how do you eat grapefruits?
You don't. Sale of those potent carriers of citric acid was restricted due to too many emergency room cases caused by people who shot themselves in the eye with the juice when trying to eat grapefruits without grapefruit spoons.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Given the way the UK has become Oceana lately, it's unfortunately not obvious that it's a joke.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
At least you still have grapefruit spoons. They are no longer sold in the UK, due to health and safety concerns over people cutting their mouths (I honestly wish I was making this one up - you can still find them in second-hand shops, but good luck finding new ones).
You are. [johnlewis.com]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
At least you still have grapefruit spoons. They are no longer sold in the UK
http://www.johnlewis.com/230483123/Product.aspx?source=14798 [johnlewis.com]
Re:Stop it! (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, but Youtube, for whatever reason, still buffers for 5 minutes
This is often caused by a badly-configured proxy. We had this problem on campus. In spite of GigE inside and a 34GB/s connection outside, YouTube still took a long time to start playing. It turned out that the proxy was configured to download the file and then pass it on to the client when it had it all. A lot of the time, the connection to the proxy would time out while the proxy was waiting for YouTube to send the whole file, but when you hit refresh it would load almost instantly.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Stop it! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just imagine, flying over the ocean at nearly the speed of sound, with a computer sitting on your lap performing billions of calculations each seconds, a battery-powered machine whose workings have been grafted with atomic precision into ultra-pure silicon. It communicates with a satellite orbiting the earth that bounces the data back, and it finds it way though a worldwide maze of wires that spans the earth like mycelium. Technology has come a long way.
All that to play online tetris.
Knowing VM (Score:2, Insightful)
200Mbps down with traffic shaping that'll cut you'r speed to 2Mbps after the first 5GB of transfer. Consumers don't need this kind of download speed, what we do need is more upload speed say a 5Mbps symmetric service.
In other news.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Uhh you must live in the desert.
Most everybody has the 20/5 package from most cable providers and FIOS.
Shenanagins (Score:5, Insightful)
Cablevision in the US supplies broadband at up to 101Mbps
Cablevision has announced that they are going to offer 101 Mbps service. Hold off on giving them credit until they actually do it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The Virgin announcement referred to an initial trial limited to 100 customers. From what I've read on Optimum Online forums, the number of trial customers currently having the Cablevision's Ultra package is probably an order of magnitude higher. Also, they claim the new package will be available throughout their entire footprint on May 11, unlike the staggered rollout that Virgin appears to be planning. Anyway, come next week, I plan on taking them up to the task ... we'll see
Take a look Timewarner! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Take a look Timewarner! (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't know much about Virgin Media, do you?
Parent
Monopoly is a disincentive to investment (Score:2)
101 Mbps from cable vision?? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I see you too played Zelda on the N64.
Re: (Score:2)
DOCSIS 3 is a bitch for the US of A. (Score:4, Informative)
From: http://www.cable360.net/ct/strategy/emergingtech/34304.html [cable360.net]
The DTI specification has a distance limitation of 200 meters between the CMTS and edge QAM modulator. There are ideas of utilizing global positioning system (GPS) to sync multiple time servers to allow the edge QAM modulator to be in a hub site and the CMTS in the headend.
The US of A is a big place. Much bigger than say - the UK. Or Japan. Each of which are about the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined. The US of A is MUCH MUCH larger. You start running into economies of scale, since your HFC needs to run to individual neighborhood drops.
It's a much bigger problem, and not quite the answer to FiOS dropping MMF right into your home.
Re:DOCSIS 3 is a bitch for the US of A. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:DOCSIS 3 is a bitch for the US of A. (Score:4, Interesting)
That only explains why broadband penetration is so low. That does not explain why the quality of service is universally poor. There are plenty of regions in the US that are as dense and populous as these countries with 3.14159 petabit/sec connections, yet in the US we get crap no matter where you live.
Parent
Bizarro world (Score:2, Insightful)
"Real" Broadband (Score:4, Interesting)
The U.S. will not catch up with other countries on the race to national broadband until:
1. The definitions of what a "broadband" connection actually is are cleared up
2. REAL competition is introduced to drive down competitors costs (the cost for cable internet access is still outrageous!)
3. The content of the internet mandates broadband connection speeds to experience.
We're probably closest to #3... but we are bogged down in legalese for #1 and #2 is frighteningly far away. Until the government forces competition for the cable companies into existence... prices will remain through the roof. Money mongers are everywhere...
Yes, but is it capped? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
A pittance... (Score:5, Funny)
Pf, 250 Million-bits...!? I demand 1 Billion-bits! [slashdot.org] *pinky to mouth*
1 Gbps (Score:2)
My cable company has had a pilot customer running at 1Gbps since late last year.
I suspect the real news here is the technology Virgin Media are using, not the speed, but it's a bit hard to tell from the summary and I'm too lazy to do the editors' job for them.
one of the fastest in the world? really? (Score:4, Informative)
Why is 200mb/s the one of the fastest in the world when they're doing 1gb/s up and down in Japan? You call 1/5 of that comparable to 1gb/s?????
Re:one of the fastest in the world? really? (Score:4, Funny)
200Mbps IS comparable to 1Gbps. The comparison reads:
200Mbps < 1Gbps
Parent
On a related note... (Score:3, Informative)
What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the point of all these increased downstream speeds if the upload speeds for your favorite sites, etc are still the same? Let's make the other end faster!
200Mbps (Score:4, Insightful)
with 180Mbps being used by the UK government to spy on you.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Its all a trade off really, you can live in a densely populated region with no space and have fast internet or live in the country side where
Re:3. 2. 1. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, I live in central New York. Mind telling me who I should call to get 100 Mbit like other similar cities in the world? Or is New York not crowded enough for you?
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting observation. But my anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that broadband came to rural, low density areas before the telcos/cable operators brought it to the higher density neighborhoods. I've had broadband at my cabin for almost 10 years, thanks to the local public power company. Meanwhile, living within spitting distance of the Microsoft campus (one of the more densly populated ane wealthy areas), Verizon stopped offering DSL and blocked CLECs from leasing lines for years. Until thei finally go
Re: (Score:2)
Eh, not so much. You hear this a lot, usually as a reason that public transport is "impossible".
80% of the US population live in urban and suburban settings.
Re:3. 2. 1. (Score:5, Informative)
The USA is a vast land with lots of empty space where as England has around 80 million people shoved into a tiny space
The UK as a whole has around 60 million people. England has less than that. Britain has a similar population density to most of the costal states in the USA - lower than some - and has some of the worst broadband in Europe. The UK has the 48th highest population density in the world, with 246/km^2. New Jersey has 438/km^2, so presumably it has much better Internet access?
It's also worth noting that the population density numbers for the UK are massively skewed by London, which has an insane population density of 4,761km^2. The London metropolitan area contains around 14m people; around 25% of the UK population. Outside this area, the population density is well in line with the most densely populated 10-15 states, which accounts for a significant proportion of the total US population.
Even in the less-populated US states, the density isn't as bad as it would at first appear. Take Utah, for example, the 40th most populous state with only 10 people per square km. Of these, 2.7m people, almost half live in Salt Lake City, with a population density up at 643.3/km^2. I suspect you will find that more than half of the people in the USA live in regions with a greater population density than the UK average so, by your argument, I'd expect all of these urban and suburbanites to have 100+Mb/s connections.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Cable isn't available in any of the slightly rural places (Even inside the M25!)
Very True,i live in harrow and cant get virgin cable even though its available just 2 streets away.Virgin's customer services never replies to any communication about extending services