Details of Virgin Media cable product leak out
Friday 15 August 2008 09:07:43 by Andrew Ferguson

It is impossible to know for sure whether the figures are what will apply to the product at launch, and with the product roll-out probably still some months away there is plenty of time for Virgin Media to change the figures.

So what has leaked out about the Virgin Media 50Mbps cable broadband package? Apparently it will have a 1.5Mbps upload speed, and the traffic management will only apply between the hours of 4pm to 9pm, with a trigger level of 6GB downloaded in the five hours. Those exceeding this limit will see their maximum speed reduced to 10Mbps for downloads and 0.5Mbps for upload traffic.

Update 11am Virgin Media has been in touch to point out that there is no traffic management on the 50Mbps tier for the trial connections, and no management levels have even been tested for product launch. So it seems the talk on forums is just that, idle chit chat and speculation.

"Virgin Media will be pioneering the UK's fastest broadband service with our 50Mb service due to roll-out from late 2008. As we're using brand new technology, twinned with significant core network upgrades, we've yet to determine if there will be traffic management on this service and if so, at what levels these might be."

Virgin Media spokesperson

If the product does launch with no traffic management and the price premium over the 20Mbps product is not too large then the Virgin Media will have a product that only faces competition from providers like Ask4 and the full fibre network of H2O networks. A few ADSL2+ providers using their own unbundled network operate with no real limits, but even when BT launches fibre products it is unlikely to have a free for all of the scale Virgin Media is promising with its 50Mbps product

A 50Mbps connection, if allowed to run flat out for a month would download 16000GB (16 TeraBytes), hard drive storage for this amount of data would cost over £1000, or fill 1700 double layer DVDs.