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Virgin Media sees 31% of its customers opt for superfast broadband
Tuesday 24 July 2012 11:57:55 by John Hunt

One million customers at Virgin Media have taken TiVo, the company has announced this week, after 250,000 customers opted for the enhanced TV service in Q2 2012 which ended on the 30th of June. Super-fast broadband take up has continued with 11% of the broadband customer base converting in the last quarter taking this to 31% of their broadband customers.

The key figures from the company show that the average revenue per user (ARPU) has increased by 3.1% in Q2 - up at £48.82. Gross cable customer additions increased 7% to 181,700 whilst disconnects fell 4.6% to 196,300. This is a net decrease in the customer base of 14,600 customers (down to 4.784 million), but Virgin expect a negative growth in this quarter due to "seasonal reasons". The upside, is that the rate of decline is lower than the same quarter in 2011 where the decline was 36,000 customers.

Broadband customers show a slight net gain of 4,000 compared with the previous quarter - 4.152m up from 4.148m. The number of superfast broadband customers (on 30meg and above) continues to increase, up 459,800 in the quarter, taking the total to 1.3 million. In the most recent three months, 14% of Virgin's customers have opted for the faster offerings between 50meg and 100meg whilst 41% of new customers opted for a 60Mbps or faster broadband connection. The speed doubling programme is proceeding well, with 22% of the network being upgraded since February (compared with 6% in April). All customers are hoped be upgraded by the end of the third quarter of 2013, and you can find out when you area will get the speed boost here.

[ Topic: Internet Service Providers | 14 comments | link to this item ]

Comments

Posted by GMAN99 10 months ago
They can't opt for anything else anymore though can they? 30meg is the minimum you can buy with their cable offering.

Posted by undecidedadrian 10 months ago
As the story said the upgrade programme won't be finished for another 15 nonths so it is possible for a lot of customers to be below 30meg.

Do these numbers include ADSL customers or just the Cable one?

Posted by GMAN99 10 months ago
What I mean is... the customers are not choosing those speeds it is the minimum they can get on cable

Posted by LT38 10 months ago
even then you dont get the speeds advertised

virgin really need taking to task as i feel there fugures are inacurate. How many of those new customers canceled there new contracts within the cool down period? i bet they was still added to statistics even after they left when they discovered they are only getting half the promised speed and intermitent Tivo service due to high utillisation. they would have a 9 months wait if not longer for the over utilisation issues plaquing VM to be fixed.

Posted by LT38 10 months ago
You only have to look at the forums and speak to people in the local areas here to see that what they supply is actually worse than the lowest ranking provider its a joke

Posted by phil_cooke 10 months ago
I expect to see those disconnects increase as more FTTC/FTTP becomes available via smaller providers who don't censor & traffic manage their connections. I've just jumped to AAISP for this very reason.

Posted by mhisani 10 months ago
@phil_cooke If you believe that you've escaped "censoring" of your internet connection then i'm sorry but you're very much misguided. I'm not quite sure what triggered that comment other than the piratebay block? They had a choice in this? In the same way i'd go as far as to say AAISP would have to do the same if action was bothered to be taken against the niche isp. Traffic management is dare i say it better than a hard limit and VMs really isn't too bad.

Posted by otester 10 months ago
The only reason you'd want cable over VDSL is if your local network is alumium based.

Posted by jb_mac 10 months ago
I've just switched away from Virgin to VDSL, as their network was running near full capacity all the time. you will get "the advertised speeds" on speedtest.net but try playing a YouTube video during peak, you might get 5 meg if you are lucky. not to mention all the ridiculous traffic management which is a pain if you are doing "non P2P" uploads, as they slow you down to a quarter of the advertised speed as soon as you have done some substantial uploads. makes it very difficult to publish legit, bandwidth-hungry, online content. Stay away from Virgin, if possible

Posted by Password_Forget 10 months ago
@mhisani

Personally i would prefer to know what my hard limit is and not be traffic managed at all, my only experience of Virgin was their ASDL product from years ago where i used to get 8kbp/s download during peak evening time on a 2mb broadband product.

Posted by Joppy 10 months ago
"he speed doubling programme is proceeding well"

I have to disagree with that part of the article. Many customers who were given a date of July for their speed upgrade are now going to have to wait until December. Probably even longer as they often move dates.

No other company advertises a product then takes a year and a half to supply it. Although the ASA has slapped VM so many times, the advertising campaigns have still done their job before VM are forced to remove/change the false advertising. It is time the ASA laid out some heavy fines!

Posted by Joppy 10 months ago
As for the Tivo box, I was offered a free one when I called up to cancel my VM package. So how many of these tivo customers in the stats were given them for free rather than paying?

Posted by dejavu59 10 months ago
What's the point of this futile article if most of the customers, current or prospective live in a VM cabled area? I'd like to see what % of VM's network is actually cabled to get some real flesh on the stats. I've been with VM for at least 5 years, live quite a distance from BT ESKIG exchange, and all I can get tops is 3.7 down and 0.7 up no matter what time of day it is, nothing else and all for £20 month. I'm the mug for staying with them but not for long CONTD/

Posted by dejavu59 10 months ago
contd/
Extract of this article is also worthless: "speed doubling programme is proceeding well,.....All customers are hoped be upgraded by the end of the third quarter of 2013, and you can find out when you area will get the speed boost here"
What Tosh!!! Chuck in my postcode KY11 2** and it says: "You do not appear to be in a cable area, please try again" Enough said. Non cable VM is rubbish and TBB should fully investigate the facts before quoting links that are nonsense.