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Virgin Media announces 20 meg broadband
Thursday 15 March 2007 12:47:59 by Sebastien Lahtinen

Virgin Media has this morning announced its plans to double the speed of its 'XL' cable broadband from 10 to 20 Mbps from May. This will make Virgin's broadband service one of the fastest services available in the UK taking advantage of its unique cable network.

This change will also result in a price rise from £35 to £37 per month (including VAT) but the upstream speeds will also increase to 768 Kbps, bringing it into line with some of the faster DSL services.

For more information, visit www.virginmedia.com

[ Topic: Internet Service Providers | 37 comments | link to this item ]

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Posted by djdannyt over 3 years ago
Does this mean that the other packages such as L will increase from 4mb to 10mb?

Posted by doowles over 3 years ago
Cool, not to interested in the bigger download, but the higher upload is very welcome

Posted by CARPETBURN over 3 years ago
This move makes no sense for the customer or for increased business for Virgin. Based on CURRENT prices (excl. special offers)2Mb=£18.00,4Mb=£25.00 and 10Mb=£35.00.
If they double the speed of the 10Mb to 20Mb for only £2.00 more it makes 2Mb and 4Mb packages far less appealing. You may be saying, thats the idea, gets everyone to sign up to or move to the 10/20Mb product, but with more and more 22Mb/24Mb LLU lines appearing with a monthly price of £24.99 it doesnt make Virgins 20Mb product that attractive either, and thats without even considering BT 21CN which people could have next year.

Posted by shaunhw over 3 years ago
Interesting.

How much a month can you use it at full speed ? About 1/2 an hour or so ?

Posted by CARPETBURN over 3 years ago
[quote]Posted by shaunhw about 1 hour ago
Interesting.
How much a month can you use it at full speed ? About 1/2 an hour or so ?[/quote]

LMAO nooooo, that would be too much and make you a heavy user :D

Posted by Dave2150 over 3 years ago
" CARPETBURN"

What you fail to realise is that 20mbit cable is what you are GUARANTEED to connect at, all these adsl2+ provides only supply an "up to", which means you can get connected at 0.5-24mbit.

Posted by jmattwood over 3 years ago
GUARANTEED.....?

Posted by semo1 over 3 years ago
i'm disappointed. ntl could have gone further and compete with adsl2+ upload speeds. now they just about match them. 10mbps is enough to stream hd video content. they should be more concerned with customers getting their advertised speeds more of the time.

Posted by dairob over 3 years ago
So what about those on the landline services who currently experience about 0.2Mbps at peak times? Going to be (as currently) ignored and left to move on if we want a decent speed.

Virgin are putting all their resources into the cabel service - I CAN'T GET CABLE. :o[

Thanks very much Mr Branson.

Posted by virginsucksbad over 3 years ago
I am currently paying for the 4Mb service, I say paying for rather than getting as recently my speed has dropped to around or below 1Mb !
Tried everything their tech lads suggested (even starting in safe mode!!) they blamed my software or my antivirus system etc etc. Maybe if i subscribe to this I might get the 4 Mb I am paying for now. lol

Posted by CARPETBURN over 3 years ago
"Posted by Dave2150
What you fail to realise is that 20mbit cable is what you are GUARANTEED to connect at, all these adsl2+ provides only supply an "up to", which means you can get connected at 0.5-24mbit"

Errr you better check that again.... http://allyours.virginmedia.com/websales/service.do?id=2
quote:Up to 2Mb, Up to 4Mb, Up to 10Mb ;) I dont see any guarantees there and just as well as from what i hear some even on just the 4Mb service are lucky to get half that at certain times.

Posted by djdannyt over 3 years ago
I am a 4mb virgin customer and have always had the full download available everytime and thats from two different houses, I wouldnt brand all virgins (NTL's) connections crap, in fact ive been very impressed, both from a support point of view, engineer came out to fix a cable modem i broke for free within one day, and ive never had an outage, give virgin a break.

Posted by ezrollers over 3 years ago
I must say that I agree with djdannyt, only that I have been (on and off) with TW for the past five years.

I recall a couple of service outages back in 2003 as well as poor usenet retention, but other than that I have always got 90%+ of the advertised bandwidth, on par with ADSL services I have had.

Posted by gaydarren over 3 years ago
Ntl's support used to be fantastic as far as im concerned, however since the virgin media logo took over the screen a few weeks ago, my speeds on the 10meg have gone beyond poor, so yet again i have to involve their 10p per min tech support people. a direct duplicate of the problem i encountered when put on the 20 meg trail late last year

Posted by doowles over 3 years ago
10mbit means 10mbit with cable. You certainly are not guaranteed anything but my experience has been full on 10mbit speeds with no usage limits.

I have had the service for over a year now.

Posted by Dave2150 over 3 years ago
jmattwood - Yes you are GUARANTEED to CONNECT at 20mbit. I think you are getting confused, as you are refering to actual download speeds, which could be alot lower I agree. But at least you have to chance to download at 20mbit with NTL cable, wheres with adsl2+ its physically impossible for thousands of lines.

Posted by Dave2150 over 3 years ago
CARPETBURN - Err you better check again, with Virgin Media's 20mbit, you will CONNECT at 20mbit, no matter what. What you actually download at however depends on your area, and the download source. Please tell me you are able to see the point im making here.....

Posted by stubanks over 3 years ago
Why not do what I did...tell Virgin your leaving...upgraded to the 4mb package for £7.99 per month a bargain me thinks.

Posted by ra2uk over 3 years ago
I have been with TW for a few years now and i almost always get the connection speed i should get, if anything lately i get more.

Dave2150 is correct in saying you will not always get your max download speed as it all depends on where you are downloading from. Try doing multiple downloads at same time and add up all the speeds, you will find it adds up to your max speed.

Posted by djdannyt over 3 years ago
ra2uk, you are spot on with that. Different sites throttle their download speeds in different ways and at different speeds.

Posted by Minkey1 over 3 years ago
I'm on TW (now Virgin M) 10 meg and out of interest, do track d/l & u/l speeds here. I'd say 99% of the time I get the advertised rates. I'd always understood that with cable a. there's no contention and b. distance (from any "junction" isn't relevant. I'll probably go for the £2 extra and double the speed. it does begin to mean streaming video at reasonable screen sizes/quality becomes realistic.

Posted by chrysalis over 3 years ago
some people will fail to realise how cable garuantuees the synch speed. One big reason why adsl is cheaper for higher burst speeds is that people with poor lines are effectively subsidising those with better lines, so someone getting say 20mbit on BE for £24 a month you can thank the guy who is paying the same for a 1mbit connection as he is subsidising you.

Posted by simond over 3 years ago
More garbage being spurted by the likes of Virgin, Sky, crap-phone warehouse. At what point will they stop telling lies and actually get prosecuted by ofcom. Ofcom useless. People who think they will be getting 20 Mbit dumb.

Posted by ra2uk over 3 years ago
All i will say is wait and see, i am sure i will be able to test the connection when the packages are upgraded. Currently i am on the 10Mb connection and atlot of the time i get a faster download than 10Mb and also a faster Upload than i should.

Posted by Amosuk over 3 years ago
The main difference between ADSL and Cable is cable is more like a managed service and you dont have to jump through hoops like an ADSL service, also with cable you are not governed by crap copper wire, which can limit your adsl service down to 512 connection. I was on 2mb connection got upgraded to 10mb for free, and now 20 mb atm am downloading at 1158KBS much better than and ADSL service on the market

Posted by reg216uk over 3 years ago
Ive had both ADSL + Cable. ADSL went down god knows how many times, very poor stability. Moved house, got Telewest, Started on the 4mb connection and received the speed that was advertised the whole time, upgraded to 10mb and received the 10mb speed as advertised, and im pretty sure ill be getting the 20mb connection speeds as advertised, ive also heard from virgin media telephone operators they have successfully tested 50mb and 100mb speeds ;).

Im a gamer and Cable = alot better ping/latency times than any ADSL out there.

I also get 1.35MB/sec download speeds brilliant :D

Posted by Zer0kbps over 3 years ago
The simple difference between ADSL & CABLE

Cable gives you the M25 with no cars on it, you can go flat out.

ADSL gives you the M25 as is, hit or miss.

Now all those that say you cannot top out a cable modem, try downloading more than one thing, 9 out of 10 sites rate throttle in anycase. most of the test sites tend not to work well above 8mbit I have noticed. good test, get a program called flashget, download linux tell it to connect 10 times ;) NTL customer 6 years (under the NTL name anyway!) + 2 under what ever it was called in the first place. lol

Posted by DazzXT over 3 years ago
Fiber Optic cable is far better the copper LLU/ADSL max services.
I work for BT Vision myself and before that BT 2nd line Tech. We
all ways get people calling up saying they don't get 8Mbit connection
well thats due to it being an upto 8Mbit you have to take into
consideration. Congestion, Copperline quality, distanice of the
exchange, eqipment used and of course if you use a 30 meter
Aluminum telephone extension but only use 3 meters lol.

Posted by DazzXT over 3 years ago
Wow called them up to upgrade to their 10Mbit service and was upgraded in UNDER 5 minuites now downloading at 1.2MB from 480KB second that i was 6 minuites ago lol.

Posted by K3vst3r over 3 years ago
People seem to forget cable is like one big giant lan...every user in your area is basically sharing the total bandwidth available every single cable tv channel, cable telephone, cable broadband users all eat a large chunk of that cake giving everyone slighlty less...i've seen it with my own eyes how bad it can get, 10mb users struggling to recieve 1 or 2mb speeds...all depends how much others use that bandwidth

Posted by Fedup_of_isp_lies over 3 years ago
Posted by K3vst3r 13 days ago
People seem to forget cable is like one big giant lan...every user in your area is basically sharing the total bandwidth available every single cable tv channel, cable telephone, cable broadband users all eat a large chunk of that cake giving everyone slighlty less...i've seen it with my own eyes how bad it can get, 10mb users struggling to recieve 1 or 2mb speeds...all depends how much others use that bandwidth

Same here but was fine until Virgin took over from NTL. I was always getting 9.5mb - 10.5mb now its 1.5mb - 6mb at best, why is this????

Posted by sannas30 over 3 years ago
What your all talking about is contention ratio which occurs on every broadband service, it varies between providers but is normally 20:1 this means that per line up to 20 users can consume the bandwidth stated that you have been supplied, unless you pay extortionately high premiums for business broadband which you then can achieve a contention ratio of 1:1. Virgin does not guarantee you will receive 10meg 4meg or 2meg. Remember virgins supply of its broadband is mainly over fibre optic cable so things like degradation of signal due to distance and pour quality cable does not effect virgin.

Posted by sannas30 over 3 years ago
Now someone else was saying that virgin will be out of date with its 20meg service next year this is true, however they are currently trying 50meg connections to some lucky customers in Kent which is forecast for release early next year lets see adsl2 hit that speed the beginning of next year lol :-)

Posted by sannas30 over 3 years ago
As far as the last comment was concerned try using this link below supplied by virgin to check your speed if there is a problem I would check your connections, if your using wireless check your security a neighbour may have access to your wireless router and maybe using your bandwidth. If all this appears fine i would contact virgin technical. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/testyourspeed/

Posted by sannas30 over 3 years ago
A further note to Fedup_of_isp_lies if you did have a good connection and now its not so good the quality of the signal may have been improved to your home, too good a signal or the signal being too hot can give you problems with your connection you may require attenuation on your modem. Go to http://192.168.100.1/ in your browser log in and check your downstream snr and power level. Ask virgin what tolerance they give for these before you tell them what your getting.

Posted by Stevgillamos over 3 years ago
I've been reading comments here and there but I'm still not sure whether to move from Virgin ADSL to Virgin cable. If I do, I'm currently running my BB on an extension upstairs from the BT phoneline downstairs. Will I be able to use a similar configuration with Cable i.e. phones both upstairs and downstairs with computer upstairs? I really am a novice at all this.

Posted by Gullvy about 1 year ago
Just a little of advice for anyone who has pc guard installed and if you find you are having slow intenet speed pages not loading up uninstall pc guard.