Branson’s Boys prepare a 50Mbps Broadband Broadside RSS

Virgin Media are reportedly testing out the feasibility of launching broadband speeds of up to 50Mbps over their existing fibre optic networks. Virgin admitting that they are unable to compete with Sky on the TV front have instead turned their attentions to the strongest suit in their hand – the superiority of fibre over copper lines.

Acting chief executive Neil Berkett, the chap who is ‘most likely to’ take over the chair vacated by Steve Burch, said in a statement that “Despite our technical advantage we are still not really standing out from the crowd,” and that the way forwards would be to “re-focus our energies onto the broadband platform.”

Virgin have in the past muttered about the possibility of 50Mbps speeds after the initial upgrade of the Size: XL speeds from 10Mbps and 20Mbps was announced way back in March, but now it seems more of a possibility.

With BT continuing to set up the obsolete-out-of-the-box 21CN ADSL2+ network nationwide, which everyone, including Sky, relies on for their internet services, making the move to unroll a service over twice the speed of the competition should reinvigorate customer interest in Virgin Media broadband.

Virgin have also recently been making some minor technical upgrades to their existing networks, which has caused services to drop in some areas – we’ve had a few emails from Virgin customers saying that over the last couple of weeks service has been decidedly patchy – chances are it could have something to do with this speed boost, then again it could just be routine maintenance.

We reckon that customers living in cabled areas would flock to 50Mbps speeds, after customers on Be and UK Online extolling the virtues of 20Mbps+ connections. Whether the smaller Size: M and Size: L packages will see a speed boost remains to be seen; it didn’t happen last time, and theoretically, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.

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9 Comments »Posted by Tom on October 22nd 2007 in BT Broadband, Be Broadband, Broadband, Next Gen Broadband, Sky Broadband, UK Online, Virgin Media



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9 Responses to “Branson’s Boys prepare a 50Mbps Broadband Broadside”

  1. Nicki Johnson said on 22 Oct 2007 at 10:30 am #

    I don’t even know what I would do with 50Mbps!!!

    I currently get around 20Mbps at the moment, sometimes a little less. This would be great if they could get it to work.

  2. Hywel said on 22 Oct 2007 at 11:28 am #

    It’s about time Virgin did this.

    Cable is the future, as we’ve seen. God knows why BT are even bothering with 21Cn,. Typical of them tho.

  3. Ed Gemmel said on 22 Oct 2007 at 1:24 pm #

    Hopefully this will encourgae others to invest in fibre – BT should press on with their proposed cable plans instead of ADSL2+, which will only result in others lazily buying local loops once BT has bent over backwards to get the 21CN up and running.

  4. Dvorak said on 22 Oct 2007 at 2:34 pm #

    50Mbps would definetly be something. I’m in a cabled area at the moment, so I’d consider siging up to Virgin if they made this available.

  5. Frank said on 30 Oct 2007 at 2:15 pm #

    50Mbps, or even 20Mbps, is fine, but if the feed is only 50kbps, what’s the point. I have never seen a data download speed greater than 120kbps on Virgin Broadband. BTW, Virgin should be investing in their support first and get staff trained up to resolve real problems instead of covering up the cracks with faux high speed links.

  6. Nicki said on 07 Nov 2007 at 3:18 pm #

    Virgin Customer service does need to be sorted out. Apparently, those not on the NTHell side of things seem to be alright…

  7. Dan said on 09 Nov 2007 at 10:00 am #

    I’m on Virgin Media’s Size: L (4Mb) Service

    I constantly get 300-400KB/s except when it throttles down to 200KB/s

  8. Peter said on 13 Nov 2007 at 11:52 pm #

    Has Virgin run out of DLL files? Last Virus update they stole one from my P.C. and I am now defenceless!

  9. Sarah said on 01 Jan 2008 at 3:25 pm #

    Middle of December I got a call from VM, im getting upgraded from 20mbps to 50mbps early this month.

    I have had not speed issues with the 20mbps service at all regularly getting upto 20mbps please not that I say 20mbps and NOT 20MBps which is what causes most peopel to complain about the speed they do not understand the difference between bits per second which the service is advertised in and Bytes per second.

    The agent advised me that even if i had had difficulty with the 20mbps service (which i hadnt) there should be no difficulty getting 50mbps which I can only assume to mean they have new hardware or bandwidth coming online for 50mbps.

    If anyone is interested, I cannot find a rollout date plan anywhere but im in the Enfield area of an ex London Cable franchise.


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