News - Virgin Media rolling out 152Mb broadband service

[edzieba]

A shame that Virgin's quoted theoretical maximum speeds are only achievable if you're the only one using the link. At the normal 50:1 contention ratio you'll only ever get a fraction of that, apart from maybe in the wee hours of the morning (assuming you're in a geriatric neighbourhood without kids torrenting overnight).

[herulach]

to be fair, I've been on the 120mb service, and regularly see upwards of 100mb, yes they throttle it, but I don't find it impacts especially heavily. Don't know about contention ratios but it doesn't seem to slow down heavily at peak time either.

[Teamsreth]

I have the 120 line, and so do a few others in my street. Very rare to get less than 110, even after redownloading a few steam games!

[crossy]

I'm on Superhub 2, I download A LOT. Mostly steam games as limited SSD space & a library of 512 games means a lot of switching and from what I've noticed it sits at 11mb/s download all the time which is nice Sounds like I'm a lucky one?!

Thanks for that - sounds like I need to go talk to them about a hub upgrade. Faster upload would also be nice because I work from home and sometimes the corporate (cloud) backups take an age. No real issue with the download speeds as it stands, just can't take the idea that I may not be getting what I pay for.

No issue with the stability either, and invariably if I see "throttling" it's due to load on the remote server. Just wish the SuperHubs weren't such a pile of xxxx, (mine's been in "modem" mode since about four weeks after I got it).

Major downside is when I go visit my relatives - they're on BTHomeHub and it seems so incredibly slow.

[ma9mwah2]

I wish they would extend their area. Where i live its almost at the point where oneside of a street has it but the other doesn't. All very strange.

[Unique]

i have the 120XXL and i get 135mb usually. i expect to get nearly 170mb down when they increase the speeds. TBH the difference between 100mb (which was 112 or something in reality) and 120mb isn't noticeable as it's just bloody fast, so again this increase won't be noticeable either. on the lower packages it should be pretty noticeable though

[MorrisR]

This thread has prompted me to upgrade my existing 20Mb service to 30Mb, with a view to upgrading to 50Mb by August. Got a £14 pcm cost saving at the same time! Simple lethargy - could have upgraded many months ago. Result. Typically getting 19.4Mb/1.1Mb at present.

[Splash]

Currently on 120Mb and usually see downstream speeds in the region of 108Mb, though that's with the SHub in modem mode and my chunky pfsense firewall doing all the routing. Unlike a couple of people in this thread I'm not seeing any overly zealous throttling either (though I wouldn't mind too much if I did), so I can comfortably get those speeds most of the time.

[Saracen]

Nice for people doing lots of downloading, I suppose, but I really don't care if I get 50Mb or 150Mb, and I don't care much (as measured by being prepared to pay for) 5Mb v even 50Mb.

I wouldn't willing pay ANYTHING to go from 50 to 150. I really just don't care, wouldn't notice, and it offers me nothing I need, nor even much want.

[Corky34]

While it's nice to see faster speeds there are some caveats that come with the latest's increases that VM are rolling out.
1) I wouldn't exactly call if free as VM bumped the price of all speed by 6.7 percent last month.
2) Rumors say you have to phone VM to get the speed increase (unlike past times), and when you do they will actively push their new porn filter as they are rolling that out at the same time. Some would say they are disguising the bad news of the filter with the good news of faster speeds.

[Agent]

It's all about upload for me...

[VijaySathyan]

Man. I wish I was born somewhere else. In India I get 512KB downspeed and thats expensive.

[Plasmastorm]

Got my email from them already. Going from 60 to 100mb sometime between July and December it says. I'm in Edinburgh.

[Marenghi]

didn't realise a lot of people aren't getting the speeds they're supposed to, guess i'm lucky. i hope they update their infrastructure to accommodate the increased speeds

[Saracen]

didn't realise a lot of people aren't getting the speeds they're supposed to, guess i'm lucky. i hope they update their infrastructure to accommodate the increased speeds

I'm on a theoretical 16Mb, of which I was explicitly told that here, at my distance from the exchange, I should expect a real-world 12-13Mb. On a number of occasions when I've tested it, I have yet to get 4Mb.

However, I haven't bothered to complain, or switch, because I don't really care.

However, I really do wish some website designers would remember we don't all have lightning fast connections, and loads of auto-playing embedded video, flash, etc, is a flaming nuisance. I find a site like that, stuffed full of adverts, I quit the site, don't bother looking there, and buy elsewhere.

[crossy]

However, I really do wish some website designers would remember we don't all have lightning fast connections, and loads of auto-playing embedded video, flash, etc, is a flaming nuisance. I find a site like that, stuffed full of adverts, I quit the site, don't bother looking there, and buy elsewhere.

Worst ones are the sites that are liberal with popup traps like AdChoices. Been to some US sites and it was like a game of minesweeper - you were concerned that moving the mouse out of the way would result in umpteen different (usually LOUD) popups. Behind those are the sites that popup a full page "registration" page or mandatory ad (like the ones that YouTube show) that you have to sit through to be able to see the page - and they carefully dim out and/or obscure the info that you were trying to look at.

Hexus went through a stage of AdChoice minefield - thankfully someone subsequently decided to cut it down to a much more reasonable level.