Virgin Media will once more up the stakes on the competition this summer, by accelerating the maximum connection speed of their premium XL broadband service from its already fast 10Mbps to 20Mbps, which is still a nose behind the as of yet untouchable 24Mbps speeds offered by Be Broadband Unlimited, but it also faster than the speeds offered by most ISPs, including Sky’s 16Mbps service.
A statement announced that the new speeds should be available to all Virgin customers by June and also hinted at an even faster service for the future:
“Customers can receive consistent speeds no matter where they live on our network and a top speed of 10Mb is available throughout our broadband addressable areas… We will be increasing this to 20Mb in June and we are also currently conducting a residential trial of a 50Mb broadband service.”
Commentators have observed that this has been timed to coincide with the recent Sky ad campaign, which has been crowing over Virgin Media’s lack of premium digital TV content, and has been viewed as compensation for customers who were left seething after the loss of channels.
Virgin will begin supplying this service at the end of May, for an extra £2 a month to the XL broadband bundle and will allow for users to downloads MP3s and high-quality video content (missed episodes of Lost?) much faster than before.
Virgin have not yet made any noises to indicate that faster speeds will be transferred to their economy packages, but as having indicated at the testing of a 50Mbps service, and with broadband speeds always on the rise, it is expected that customers of the Size: M and Size: L packages will be similarly furnished in the near future.
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Steve Wood said on 15 Mar 2007 at 10:32 am #
Do you think it would be more beneficial to go for either the M or L package if we do not plan to download lots of mp3s or movies?
Matt_Broadband said on 15 Mar 2007 at 10:47 am #
You should be fine with the M package, even if you are planning downloading music or movies as the package doesn’t have a set download limit. The speed of 2mb should be plenty for now as well, and may rise in the near future!