re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

Given your desperation to save a few quid on Virgin Media services as you happily tolerate crap speeds from Plusnet in return for a big discount it's fair to say you aren't the right person to look to for beta testing of BT's G.fast products.

G.fast is a way from production yet, sadly. Longer term Openreach have bugger all to compete with Virgin Media as they made the wrong bet. They hoped they could spend the bare minimum on FTTC and collect the plaudits for delivering 'fibre optic broadband' and it's looking increasingly like they were wrong. Virgin Media can deliver 600Mb without breaking a sweat, Openreach can't deliver 500Mb to me without further investment in deeper fibre.

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

Problem is that these days it's the WiFi itself and not the WAN connection that's the bottleneck. When you are sharing the WiFi then other users will affect your connection even if there's dedicated bandwidth upstream of the router.

---------- Post added at 00:59 ---------- Previous post was at 00:58 ----------

Last I heard VM had no plans to deliver anything to you, has that changed?

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

That's really funny, I still haven't received my free automatic upgrade from the last time around, that slipped nearly 9 months anyway...

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

We can see now, why Virgin put their prices up twice this year... :P

Question for a non-cable-tech, do you need DOCSIS 3.1 in your area before you can get 300 up from 152 or is this speed capable from the current infrastructure?

Was very surprised they are upgrading so early but might have been doing lots of work in the background. Lat time it was months before the actual roll-out stared. Don't get me wrong though, all for it!!

On a side note: I am definitely a Virgin Fanboy

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

Are you sure about that? What are you on and what are you supposed to be on?

---------- Post added at 08:28 ---------- Previous post was at 08:27 ----------

You don't need DOCSIS3.1, but you will likely need a new superhub.

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

[QUOTE=Kushan;35794296]Are you sure about that? What are you on and what are you supposed to be on?[COLOR="Silver"]

I am on 60, which was supposed to be increased to 100, my area has been done - services checker says 152 is available - but it has never been lifted.

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

[QUOTE=OhReally;35794301]Really? What does your modem configuration screen say? I'm surprised there's still areas left.

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

That may well be so, but in practical terms very few of us in residential streets are going to have enough people using our hotspot for long enough and heavily enough for us to notice. To log on to your spot they are going to need to be using Virgin Mobile and sharing their own Virgin hotspot anyway. My neighbour on VM will not be using my hotspot because he has his own. So, it has to be down to passers-by.

As I said elsewhere ( http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/12...ming-your.html ) only two people have logged on to my pure FON hotspot in the last 10 years even though there are 100s of thousands of people sharing their BT Fon hotspots to give them the right to roam. I tested my FON spot only yesterday and it gave me 10Mb download in the street and 8Mb upload, so it is worth using. ( I got similar figures of my ASUS router connected to my SH. ) Mostly what will happen is as people pass my house their device will automatically log on to my hotspot and then log off again as they move on. Just maybe they will notice and stop to make a call or have a quick browse., but seeing as how they can go stand by one of our two street boxes dishing out 300Mb then why bother standing outside my house getting perhaps 20Mb from my 300Mb connection?

The main thrust, and usage, of the VM WiFi network will be in public place like stations and quite possibly around street boxes.

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

In the trial so will probably be getting the new hardware to test on.

Thanks for the quick reply.

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

Nope, not so. It's either a virgin mobile customer OR Sharing their hotspot. And this assumes Virgin won't try to sell access to their wifi deployment as well (like "the cloud").

You are right though, I don't think many people are going to notice or care. Virgin's implementation should be more solid than BT's equivalent and I don't think many people care there.

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

[QUOTE=Kushan;35794302]60 down / 3 up

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

Oh wow. Well, hopefully you'll jump to 200Mbit soon, then!

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

Yes, Kush you are right about not having to be a VM mobile customer to access VM Hotspots. Sorry.

Edit . I do use BT Fon, but not that much. The signal is not good enough mostly. I park outside a BT Fon hotspot on the school run waiting for my kids and barely get enough bandwidth to stream or browse, let alone download.

On another subject, I find it interesting that people are talking about needing a different, superdooper, superhub to handle 300Mb. People here, who say they are on the trial, are expecting a new SH to test 300mb, yet we are only 6 or 7 weeks from the beginning of the roll out! Surely, with the announcement, these particular trials will be tailing off, and VM must have thousands of new trialled superhubs stashed away ready to go. I know that the science indicates a new SH, but I do wonder.

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

The hardware is probably ready, but the software is likely what's really being tested. I don't think the "new" Superhub is going to be a totally new device, it's going to be a device that's already used by other ISP's.

re: Virgin Media 70, 100 & 200 Mb Upgrades
 

...but re branded of course.