Virgin Media to demo 200Mbps broadband.

[Media Boy UK]

Virgin Media has confirmed plans to stage public demonstrations of its 200Mbps broadband service at this year's Ideal Home Show.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/digitaltv/news/a209556/virgin-media-to-demo-200mbps-broadband.html

[*sloman*]

hmmm wonder what they are going to show with it?

Multitasking iplayer, xbox, web browsing all at the same time. i can do this with my 50Mb

give me 100UP/100Ddown

[Ignitionnet]

An uncapped DOCSIS 3 modem, whoopie :zzz:

[dd11]

Great, but personally I don't really feel any excitment with news of download speeds faster then the 50mb is at the mo.

Just a little frustrating that all the hype is about download, when they still haven't mentioned anything about upload speed, i wonder if it will pop up when they do there demo.

[uno]

I didnt know the virgin network/UBRs near Earls Court had been upgraded for 200mb broadband I expect just demo videos of what you can do

[Ignitionnet]

I didnt know the virgin network/UBRs near Earls Court had been upgraded for 200mb broadband I expect just demo videos of what you can do

It's the same technology as the 50M just without a 50M limit on the modem. They could even bring a CMTS/uBR with them.

[Pantsu-san]

I'd love them to show a CM maxing out at 200Mb and then disconnecting in time to a bunch of T3/T4 errors in the log file. Then, the only way to get the demo working again is to hard reset the modem to have it crawl along at 1Mb for 15mins before returning to the speed it's meant to be. For a bit.

I'd suggest that the poor person running the demo have the number of the Chief Executive's office on speed dial.

[Phil-ntl]

Never one to put a dampener on things but it would be interesting to see if it suffers from the same speed drops, disconnections, "motorola ubr issues" as a fair few customers seem to experience on the 50mb service.

To be fair, mine has been rock solid since day one but if this happens I can see a few people with egg on faces


Phil

---------- Post added at 21:23 ---------- Previous post was at 21:21 ----------

Id suggest that the poor person running the demo have the number of the Chief Executive's office on speed dial.

Or a very thick skin and a good line in excuses


Phil

[Welshchris]

I'd love them to show a CM maxing out at 200Mb and then disconnecting in time to a bunch of T3/T4 errors in the log file. Then, the only way to get the demo working again is to hard reset the modem to have it crawl along at 1Mb for 15mins before returning to the speed it's meant to be. For a bit.

I'd suggest that the poor person running the demo have the number of the Chief Executive's office on speed dial.

u saying that reminded me of this.... lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzFUcDKC64E

[Pantsu-san]

Well, here's to VM coming out with the XP equivalent. Or, better yet, W7.

*raises glass*

[roughbeast]

Virgin Media has confirmed plans to stage public demonstrations of its 200Mbps broadband service at this year's Ideal Home Show.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/digitaltv/news/a209556/virgin-media-to-demo-200mbps-broadband.html


Lifted from your link:-

"An additional 200Mbps trial is due to get under way soon in Coventry, while Virgin Media intends to offer a 100Mbps service to customers by the end of the year."

I'm in Coventry. They just finished my 5Mb upload trial last week. Here's hoping I'm in line for the 200Mb download trial. I wonder if my upload speed would be increased at least proportionally?

http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk/results/22304261.png (http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk)

[*sloman*]

Watch all of our modems go down for 30mins while they are showing this.

[timbiller]

hmmm wonder what they are going to show with it?

Multitasking iplayer, xbox, web browsing all at the same time. i can do this with my 50Mb

give me 100UP/100Ddown

A colleague in Holland is just having duplexed 100MB fitted - fibre into his house.

€70/month uncapped and with unlimited in-country telephone service.

/green

Tim

[cook1984]

hmmm wonder what they are going to show with it?

Multitasking iplayer, xbox, web browsing all at the same time. i can do this with my 50Mb

give me 100UP/100Ddown

You can't multitask on VM, the upload speed is too low. A person downloading at full speed (e.g. 50 meg) will require all of the available upload bandwidth as well for control and acknowledgement packets. VM have deliberately set the upload speed at just high enough to support full speed downloading.

Of course if the downloader is using P2P then even when not at full speed down most of the upload bandwidth will be consumed anyway.

As such if you were to try watching a video or making a Skype call while someone else is downloading you will get stuttering and freezing.

The biggest advantage of a 100/100 connection, which people tend not to realise, is that it is almost impossible for one person to saturate it and even if you do it doesn't matter. Even when using P2P there will be spare capacity available. One person really can watch a streaming HD movie while someone else uses a HD webcam, sends a large email and a third person is busy downloading some files while uploading photos to Facebook.

Even when close to saturation of upload bandwidth because there is so much of it packets are not delayed nearly as long as they are on the pathetic speeds VM provides. A packet has to wait up to 200 times longer to be sent on a 512k connection as on a 100Mb one. A bit of prioritisation but the router helps of course, but the main thing is that latency is massively reduced.

[timbiller]

The biggest advantage of a 100/100 connection, which people tend not to realise, is that it is almost impossible for one person to saturate it and even if you do it doesn't matter. Even when using P2P there will be spare capacity available. One person really can watch a streaming HD movie while someone else uses a HD webcam, sends a large email and a third person is busy downloading some files while uploading photos to Facebook.



Many businesses survive with hundreds of staff sharing a 2Mbps E1 or a 45Mbps E3 leased line - so 100Mbps each way is just massive and very OTT for a home ;-) And as for 200Mbps ...

What's the upstream bandwidth on a VM 50Mbps line?

Tim

[pabscars]

Many businesses survive with hundreds of staff sharing a 2Mbps E1 or a 45Mbps E3 leased line - so 100Mbps each way is just massive and very OTT for a home ;-) And as for 200Mbps ...

What's the upstream bandwidth on a VM 50Mbps line?

Tim

Not enough :D

supposed to 1.75 Mbps please note I said supposed

---------- Post added at 16:00 ---------- Previous post was at 15:59 ----------

Forgot to mention on a good day I see 1.6Mbps

[|Kippa|]

200mbit is nice, I was just wondering, they said that they intend to bring 100mbit out at the end of the year. Do you think they maybe going to bring out 100mbit with 5mbit at the same time, rather than do a seperate 5mbit upload upgrade then 100mbit afterwards?

I am not saying that I think 100mbit might be a free upgrade, it might be a new tier. All I am saying is that the upload increase could be timed with the 100mbit launch.

[Bman]

Many businesses survive with hundreds of staff sharing a 2Mbps E1 or a 45Mbps E3 leased line - so 100Mbps each way is just massive and very OTT for a home ;-) And as for 200Mbps ...

What's the upstream bandwidth on a VM 50Mbps line?

Tim

Of course they can survive on low bandwidth leased lines, the staff aren't all streaming HD video, downloading multiple Gb's of computer games and all the other things home users do.

100/100mb connections may seem like overkill if you try to fit it in with yesterdays web applications but if it was installed in every household in the country right now it would revolutionize the way people use computers, it would essentially let people connect to others as if they were on the same local network. You could be visiting friends or family and have access to all your data, remote access would be much more useful than it is at the moment.

When people find new ways to exploit super fast 2-way bandwidth, 100/100mb would start to restrict people with multiple people sharing the connection, then the same old "xxxmb is overkill" arguments will surface once again :D

[deathtrap3000]

Went there today and tried out 200meg bb. I did a speedtest and got 183meg down and less than 5meg up.

[Ignitionnet]

Went there today and tried out 200meg bb. I did a speedtest and got 183meg down and less than 5meg up.

*Nods*

Good to see the indifference to upstream extends to epeen flexing demonstrations as well as production services. Even worse ratio than on 50 right now and kinda demonstrates my earlier point. They are demonstrating nothing revolutionary it's just a modem with an uncapped downstream running on exactly the same 4 downstreams and 1 x 9M upstream that the current network is deployed on.

As per with Virgin and internet services (hopefully to change soon) gold star for style, nil points for substance.

[Chrysalis]

funny stuff

lets give end users the ability to single handedly saturate the isp link.

[Ignitionnet]

funny stuff

lets give end users the ability to single handedly saturate the isp link.

Actually it can work just fine so long as there aren't too many customers on each segment and DOCSIS copes fairly well with downstream congestion, it's upstream it struggles with.

Cablevision in the USA have been running a service like this for a while on their Boost service, uncapped downstream and 5Mbps upstream over DOCSIS 2. They advertise it as 30Mbps and most people see that or higher most of the time.

If people expect 200Mbps 24x7 they are going to be quite disappointed though.

[Chrysalis]

of course, if you were to have a 200mbit service that went down to 30mbit when things are busy that on its own dont see too bad, but then you consider the other side affects such as the latency increase and packet loss which occurs when its saturated.

cablevision is very different, although uncapped they dont sell it as that. if vm sell this as 200mbit then that is what people will expect. There will be people pushing 200mbit, there is plenty of gigabit servers out there capable of pushing out that speed. The biggest mistakes isp's make (repeatedly) is thinking when they increase the end user speed it will not be utilised.

[roughbeast]

of course, if you were to have a 200mbit service that went down to 30mbit when things are busy that on its own dont see too bad, but then you consider the other side affects such as the latency increase and packet loss which occurs when its saturated.

cablevision is very different, although uncapped they dont sell it as that. if vm sell this as 200mbit then that is what people will expect. There will be people pushing 200mbit, there is plenty of gigabit servers out there capable of pushing out that speed. The biggest mistakes isp's make (repeatedly) is thinking when they increase the end user speed it will not be utilised.

Well we're soon going to find out. 100Mbs gets rolled out later this year. 200Mbs trials are recruiting now in Coventry and Ashford. I was one of the first to register yesterday.

[General Maximus]

All I am saying is that the upload increase could be timed with the 100mbit launch.

If they did that the upload upgrade would be pointless. They should have sorted the upload upgrade out by now because 50mbit has been out for over a year. If they leave it till 100mbit comes it is going to be pointless because we are all going to want 100mbit which will probably come with 5mbit up with the promise that it will be increased to 10mbit, and by the time they get round to doing that they'll probably launch 200mbit. It is a vicious circle.

[The PIT]

Trying to think what router works with 200 mb. Going to be an expensive bit of kit.

[General Maximus]

I have always had linksys right from start and I'll always stick with them because they are great. It looks like this is the one we are going to need for 200mbit

http://www.dabs.com/products/linksys-by-cisco-dual-band-wireless-n-gigabit-router-5KJN.html?refs=4294948528-4294948526

[danlufan]

I have always had linksys right from start and I'll always stick with them because they are great. It looks like this is the one we are going to need for 200mbit

http://www.dabs.com/products/linksys-by-cisco-dual-band-wireless-n-gigabit-router-5KJN.html?refs=4294948528-4294948526

That isn't a bad price either, it all depends who VM do a deal with. They have already changed from netgear to DLINK once.

[The PIT]

I have always had linksys right from start and I'll always stick with them because they are great. It looks like this is the one we are going to need for 200mbit

http://www.dabs.com/products/linksys-by-cisco-dual-band-wireless-n-gigabit-router-5KJN.html?refs=4294948528-4294948526

No mention of the firewall throughput. If it's only 50 meg it'll no good on a 100 mb service.

I've got a Vigor 2920n which allows 100mb through and none wireless allows 150mb.

Plus it's dual wan which you need for virgin as it's fairly unreliable.

[General Maximus]

doesnt matter to me, I'll still buy a linksys one, screw VM. They gave me a netgear router when I got 50mbit and I just left it shrink wrapped in the box and ordered a linksys wireless N router