Virgin Media 100Mbps service goes live
Wednesday 08 December 2010 10:37:05 by Andrew Ferguson

Virgin Media has taken its 100Mbps service live now in four parts of the country, the lucky areas are:

• Heckmondwike
• Farnborough
• Colchester
• Barry, South Wales

The roll-out will continue across the Virgin Media cable network during 2011 with completion set for 2012, at which point almost half the UK will have the option for a 100Meg service at a reasonable price point. The 10Meg upstream speed is respectable, and given powerful enough video encoding solutions would allow someone at home to transmit video at current HD TV levels.

The 100Mbps product costs £45 a month on its own, or if take a phone line from Virgin Media it reduces to £35 a month (remember that the phone line costs £12.24. As with most monthly billed services these days, these lowest prices assume you pay by Direct Debit and use online billing. The service is subject to traffic management (as detailed on the Virgin Media website) that may see file sharing services slowed down between 4pm to 9pm and 10am to 3pm, examples of what Virgin Media define as file sharing is 'Limewire, Gnutella, BitTorrent and Newsgroup (Usenet) traffic'.

While take-up of the previous fastest product which was the 50Mbps service, was not as high as the lower speed services, now it can be had for £25 a month we would expect more people to start buying it.