Virgin Media UK Pilots 200Mbps Broadband Speeds 179
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."
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...
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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.
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At the moment their top 50Mbit tier is totally uncapped [virginmedia.com]. I guess if you raped it constantly they might say something, but at least in comparison to their other offerings it is.
If im going to be capped id rather be capped during the times their network is under the most load, than some blanket 50GB/100GB cap for the month. Which is what seems most common. At least i can make full use of my 20Mbit connection during off-peak times.
If i wanted i could leave bittorrent running for ~12hrs at night and not hit any
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...
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).
Re:Stop it! (Score:4, Funny)
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 ;)
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.
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Given the way the UK has become Oceana lately, it's unfortunately not obvious that it's a joke.
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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]
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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]
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Headline: THE PC BRIGADE HAVE BANNED ARE SPOONS
Inside: The menace of razor-sharp grapefruit spoons: why isn't Labour doing anything about it?
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you get throttled back to ISDN speeds for a few hours
I wish I could be throttled to ISDN speeds, that's faster than my existing connection. Thank you AT&T.
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Virgin's lies [virginmedia.com] about throttling are ridiculous, the thing is whoever is doing it is lying both ways, the higher ups (branson et al) have been told, and many customers also fall for it.
Yeah right, if i don't encrypt them im instantly throttled. Fortunatly the threat of several hours also isn't followed through and as soon as i drop my upload rate below whatever is setting off thier sensors today, im fine.
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Upstream just about fast enough for the TCP ACKs
Upstream ratios are poor, yes. They're 10/0.5, 20/0.7, 50/1.5.
throttled back to ISDN speeds for a few hours
Personally I think it's a sensible and fair scheme, but I encourage all readers to decide for themselves [virginmedia.com]. The 20Mbit throttle means 6GB in one peak period (there are two separate peak periods per weekday) and you're throttled to 5Mbit for five hours. Big fucking deal. The 50Mbit service is currently 100% cap-free but is considerably more expensive than the 20Mbit service.
Painful technical support
Oh please. Just power cycle your modem :)
IWF
Yes, they're as bad as everyone els
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I don't quite see how you can mention this and then say "Virgin Media are so bad they almost make BT look good. Almost.". BT use Phorm. Virgin don't!
I don't know what gave you that idea. As of two weeks ago [theregister.co.uk] Virgin media were still using Phorm.
You can get them from Lakeland. Sounds like something made up by the Daily Mail.
Hmm, they seem easier to find now. I had a friend a few years ago who spent six months hunting for them and eventually found a set in an antique shop. Perhaps she just didn't look very hard.
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You can get them from Lakeland. Sounds like something made up by the Daily Mail.
Hmm, they seem easier to find now. I had a friend a few years ago who spent six months hunting for them and eventually found a set in an antique shop. Perhaps she just didn't look very hard.
You do realise something being difficult to find doesn't mean it's banned?
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Switch to a (non BT) ADSL provider. I dumped Virgin for Be a few months back due to slow downloads, STM, Phorm etc and despite the fact that I'm only syncing at 10Mbit due to distance from the exchange it still shows Virgin up for the steaming pile of crap that it is.
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.
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Re:Stop it! (Score:5, Informative)
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If they have a true transparent proxy then putting in another proxy will cause your traffic to hit the transparent proxy then the other proxy.
The point of a transparent proxy is to force all HTTP traffic through it without giving the end user a choice.
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If they have a true transparent proxy then putting in another proxy will cause your traffic to hit the transparent proxy then the other proxy.
A transparent proxy will generally only catch traffic targetted at port 80. So if your "other proxy" is listening on a port other than 80 you can buypass the transparent proxy.
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At least you don't have Phorm to worry about, or Virgin's exceptionally poor customer service.
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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.
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Try pretending you're only downloading linux distros at 200Mbps! You'd have them all in fifteen minutes, and the rest is warez and tentacle porn - almost by a process of elimination.
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My ISP has no business cutting off my supply of tentacle porn, thank you.
In other news.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Uhh you must live in the desert.
Most everybody has the 20/5 package from most cable providers and FIOS.
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I wish. I am in northeast NJ, which is literally line of sight to NYC (about 20 miles, or 45 minutes on a good day) and a *very* affluent community with a lot of business folks.
Comcast is our cable co, Verizon does phones.
Well, I've been corrected - Comcast provides a 50/10 package for $140/mo, which is still throttled and capped. And I'm not giving Comcast any more money.
Verizon is putting in FiOS at the extreme edges of the town. Their best DSL offering is 5/768
Currently, we have 3/384 through Att-resold
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The 50/10 is throttled, that must really suck if that is true because I have no idea what they would throttle it at(5hrs maxed out?). Time Warner around here didn't say a peep when I was downloading almost over a 1TB a month through SSL; although I don't touch bittorrent with a 10 foot pole.
You must be caught up in that fiasco of New Jersey and Massacheusets; where they are one of the last holdouts on Verizon mass adoption. Check out DslReports.com under your ISP for more insight and you might even find a w
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Just on dslreports actually, and doing some other researching.
Turns out, actually, that DOCSIS 3 doesn't stand a fucking chance against FiOS. I know Verizon sucks, but they're literally doing almost entirely what we paid them to do 10 years ago; they're replacing (or trying to replace) their entire physical copper plant with fiber, then running the phone over that.
That takes balls, even if you are given the money. But now, Comcast's single-wire coaxial cable and per-block amplifiers can't compete. Verizon c
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Mod parent up. People have a tendency to play too fast-and-loose with their units.
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.
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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?
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Unless, of course, it ends up being capped.
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If the recent stories about caps are all true, Time Warner wants to punish all its customers equally. Hopefully they're learning from that backlash, but it's more likely they're just going to come up with a quieter way to cut costs.
Now, I'm not saying TWC is the devil, but I have seen their service visibly decline as people transitioned from dialup. Years ago, I was very happy with my Time Warner service. I thought it was overpriced, but the service itself was good. That was back when they were still on
Monopoly is a disincentive to investment (Score:2)
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believe the C*Os at Comcast have their pockets wide open to certain Federal and/or State officials (that have a say in breaking up such monopolies).
It's a happy occurrence that "C*O" can be satisfied by "CULO".
101 Mbps from cable vision?? (Score:5, Funny)
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I see you too played Zelda on the N64.
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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)
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.
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I get 20/20 from FIOS and it's damn good. No caps, no overages (15TB in 6 months), and I could get 50/20 but I'd rather save the $$$.
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As big as Texas and Oklahoma combined? Please.
Texas alone is nearly three times larger than the UK (and nearly twice as large as Japan).
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I think the grandparent post is confusing mi^2 and km^2.
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I've heard places like California and Texas compete for "Biggest economies" of the world. Why don't individual states support internet broadband development? Is this a restriction at the Federal level?
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Just so you know, "economies of scale" are something completely different. They refer to the cost savings of doing a larger number of the same transaction. Mostly this relates to being able to spread fixed costs over more units made/sold. However, there are also economies of scale in variable costs like sh
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If you are in the 50% of the UK population that is even remotely rural, cable is not available. I see no reason why availability in cities and large towns in the US should be any different from the availability in cities and large towns here.
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That's why you don't put edge QAMs out in the hub all alone. You run a SONET style backbone from the headend and put your CMTS in the primary hub, use MUX'd AM fiber to the secondary and demux to the nodes.
200 meters won't even get across the primary hub in some of the places I work.
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Lest anyone think DOCSIS 3 is just new hardware at both ends, let me assure you - it isn't.
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. /quote>
Um, as an author of the spec that covers the edge QAM in the above quote, I'm scratching my head wondering what on Earth that quote has to do with anything on-topic. The DTI spec (which is to do with timing across devices, which has to be very tight) basically says "for now, keep these things close together so we can keep the timing in sync". Eventually, if it becomes important (which it isn't at the moment; if it were, we'd have done it already), there'll be another spec that will describe how to keep the timing sufficiently synchronised when the devices aren't all in the same building.
I'm at a loss to understand how that quote somehow leads to the title "DOCSIS 3 is a bitch for the US of A". DOCSIS 3.0 was, after all, designed in the US and the spec work was driven essentially entirely by US cable companies.
Bizarro world (Score:2, Insightful)
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"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...
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What about the Fibrecity fibre to the home scheme in Bournemouth? H2O Networks are offering free installation, but are Virgin going to be the only ISPs permitted to offer services over it?
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Sorry, but you do realise that Virgin Media are own the monopoly on Fibre Optic in the UK?
No they aren't. They use coax to the house, fibre for the backbone. BT also uses fibre for the backbone, copper to the house. Neither is offering fibre to the house yet.
Yes, but is it capped? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
New super-fast Internet at least 2 days out of 7! (Score:2)
Virgin ("We've Never Done It Before, And We Don't Really Know How To" [today.com] Media), operators of Britain's only cable television network, has launched a new 200-megabit Internet service.
"That's 200 megabits total over the day, usually," said Virgin Media phone menu robot Mark Schweitzer, "but it's very fast when it's going. Plain old ADSL can't hold a candle to it. You can hit your download limit in minutes!"
Customers will be able to add the boost free for three months, after which they will need to pay an ad
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
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Anything that lets you transfer a full BD 1080p stream in faster than realtime (~50Mpbs) is fairly comparable if you ask me. I got 20Mbit now (for real too), and whether downloading a new Linux CD takes me 5 minutes (20Mbit), 30 seconds (200Mbit) or 6 seconds (1Gbps) doesn't really matter. I wish my upload was better though, I only got 20/2Mbit and wish it was symmetric like 20/20Mbit. Give it another few years and it'll probably be standard anyway...
Except for Comcast or Time Warner (Score:2)
Today Comcast and Time Warner announced 200mbps service. Now you can exceed your monthly bandwith cap in an hour.
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.
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I wish you the best of luck. (Score:2)
Regards: a Scandinavian.
Sorry , couldn't help myself.
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That's OK, in Australia we consider crappy internet a good trade off for warmth and beaches.
No surprise (Score:2)
have they set a monthly limit? (Score:2)
to be realistic, you can burn through a gigabyte in 40 seconds with those speeds.
250GB is only 3 hours at those speeds.
What will they do?
What's the point of having those speeds available, if you burn through your month's ration in 3 hours?
6 hours for comcast's DOCSIS 3.0 implementation. A month's ration in 6 hours. Something's gotta give fellas.
Linux is not piracy. Netflix HD is not piracy. Game demos over Xbox Live are not piracy. Hulu is not piracy. Steam is not piracy.
Something's gotta give.
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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?
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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?
They still have to support the non-crowded areas. Money an infrastructure are still being spread a lot further.
The United States is a difficult country to wire. This didn't stop being true when it became fashionable to bash Americans.
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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
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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.
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Actually, the South East of England is not the most densely populated part of the country. That honour goes to the North West, around Manchester / Liverpool / Leeds etc. For example, go round the M25, it is mostly countryside. Go round the M60, it is mostly built up.
England is actually less densely populated than Germany.
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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
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I live in Fairfield, Iowa, a town of ten thousand people in the middle of nowhere, and we have 100 mbit (full duplex) fiber to the home for $65/mo.
Granted, it's capped at 20 gigs/mo, though I have no idea to what extent this is enforced. But when I put that speed and that price in my Slashdot sig, it seemed like every third post, someone would reply to me asking where I live.
Seems most places are stuck with Comcast and friends...
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The USA is a vast land with lots of empty space where as England has around 80 million people shoved into a tiny space,
England does not have 80 million people, the UK (this involves more than England) has around 60 million people, and they don't all live in dark satanic mills anymore. Really it's not so much more populated than some US states, particularly if you're looking at the cities - these are roughly comparable between countries for population density.
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The population of England is only 60 million just now - half the population is located in the large cities like Birmingham, Nottingham and London. However, most of the IT industry (around 300,000 people) is located in the Greater London Area or Home Counties. It is easy upgrading central London - that area always seems to be upgraded first, followed by the other university cities like Cambridge, Oxford, Reading and Edinburgh.
However, for those out in the countryside - just two or three miles outside the cit
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It's a typo, they meant 200mb/s, or 1 bit every 5 seconds.
That said, I can get 1.1MB/s downloads (around 8.8Mb/s) from my 10Mb/s Virgin cable connection. Perhaps you should complain to them instead of Slashdot? They usually try to resegment on oversubscribed parts of their network.