50Mbps broadband for £51 a month from Virgin Media

Today Virgin Media took the wraps off of their new 50Mbps premium broadband service, which promises to provide the fastest home broadband experience in the UK yet. As well as providing record-breaking speeds, the XXL service also offers truly unlimited downloads unhindered by any bandwidth-throttling, traffic-shaping or hidden “unlimited” limits.

Journalists were given the chance to experience the power of 50Mbps broadband themselves at the press launch where two PCs and a laptop along with a PlayStation 3 and an Xbox 360 were all running nicely alongside each other, all sharing the same connection. YouTube videos buffered quickly, and iPlayer programmes (in high quality) loaded in next to no time at all.

Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett was keen to stress that the new service is not just a premium service aimed at gamers and heavy downloaders (although it is that as well) but rather “whatever you want it to be,” something that can be used by everyone in the family for all sorts of purposes, a sentiment reflected by the surroundings.

Areas of the conference room were mock ups of typical domestic set ups, with the 360 running Halo 3 in what was ostensibly the boys’ bedroom, and a PC with Facebook as the home page in what was meant to be a social network-addicted teenage girl’s room.

The ‘lounge’ area of the room housed the laptop and the PS3, which was running PlayStation Home the Virgin Media spokesman ran his avatar into the virtual cinema area of Home, and began streaming trailers for the forthcoming Watchmen movie in HD.

Berkett said that the launch of the 50Mbps service heralded a “Golden Age” for broadband, and that this was just the beginning of things to come, with the existing fibre optic network apparently capable of handling speeds of up to 100Mbps. The upgrades required for this new premium broadband service will also eventually see more HD TV content available on-demand.

He also likened the installation of the technology required to launch 50Mbps services to ‘opening up a new lane on the M25′ meaning that those customers who’ll want to pay extra for the faster services will be able to do so, and that the network will become less congested for Virgin Media customers on the Size: M and Size: L connections.

The new service is available now to some 1.5 million homes within the Virgin Media cable network, for either £35 (plus £11 line rental) with the Phone: M weekend calls package, or £51 a month on its own along with a £50 set up fee which includes an engineer visit and full installation.

Upgrades for the new service are to be rolled out to roughly 40 per cent of the 12.6 million homes covered by the Virgin network by the end of this year, with a complete rollout due to finish sometime in Q2 2009.

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