View Full Version : Virginmedia to trial 50Mb service
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/digitaltv/a75800/virgin-looks-for-50mbps-triallists.html
Taken from DigitalSpy. Not sure why they choose Ashford and Dover for all their trials but hey ho. Trials to begin very soon of a 50Mb downstream and 1.5Mb upstream. Other sites reporting that there could be a national roll out as early as next Easter. Great news if your a mega downloader. I must say that my current 20Mb service is overkill at times. Interesting to see the results as they happen as the initiall roll out of the 10Mb and 20Mb trials in Kent were extremely succesfull last time around I believe.
If this works, then will we another step change in content rich web applications ?
JimmyEatWorms
18-09-2007, 11:55
They'll probably throttle it back to 512k at peak times if you download over 1Gb per month ;)
AboveTheSalt
18-09-2007, 11:57
£47pcm? Hardly going to be competitive, is it?
£47pcm? Hardly going to be competitive, is it?
I dunno. It maybe price restricitive but for me it is offering more choice. ADSL cannot offer a 50mb service. So if you are in an area that can deliver a stable 50Mb and thats what you want then it would appear a fair price.
I am not too upto date on price comparisons but when you consider BE unlimited is £24.00 for an upto 24Mb package, VM's price isnt that much different at £47.00 for a 50mb service. Both around the £1.00 per Mb
JimmyEatWorms
18-09-2007, 12:02
It's only £10 more than their XL package for over twice the bandwidth. I'd say that's plenty competitive.
dirtydog
18-09-2007, 12:07
Yeah seems like a very good price actually, for what is extremely fast for consumer broadband in Britain at the moment.
I seem to remember ntl used to charge something like that for 1Mb or 1.5Mb not all that many years ago, didn't they? Back when it was their top tier service.
ChemicalKicks
18-09-2007, 12:08
It's only £10 more than their XL package for over twice the bandwidth. I'd say that's plenty competitive.
They dont have any competition though, £50 for 50Mb doesnt seem that affordable to me.
Hopefully it will be a kick up the arse for all the other providors.
AboveTheSalt
18-09-2007, 12:11
I dunno. It may be price restrictive but for me it is offering more choice. ADSL cannot offer a 50mb service. So if you are in an area that can deliver a stable 50Mb and that's what you want then it would appear a fair price.
I am not too upto date on price comparisons but when you consider BE unlimited is £24.00 for an up to 24Mb package, VM's price isn't that much different at £47.00 for a 50mb service. Both around £1.00 per Mb
It's only £10 more than their XL package for over twice the bandwidth. I'd say that's plenty competitive.To quote from your initial post "I must say that my current 20Mb service is overkill at times."
It may be just £1 per Mb, but if you don't need it, it it seeems to me to be a waste of money. Perhaps, as you say, when more product is available, it will make sense - for the present, I am happy to pay £20 for an effective 6Mbps.
Incidentally, do you take any other services from Virgin Media?
dirtydog
18-09-2007, 12:15
That is the thing with having a very fast line isn't it - what exactly are you going to do with it?
JimmyEatWorms
18-09-2007, 12:29
To quote from your initial post "I must say that my current 20Mb service is overkill at times."
It may be just £1 per Mb, but if you don't need it, it it seeems to me to be a waste of money. Perhaps, as you say, when more product is available, it will make sense - for the present, I am happy to pay £20 for an effective 6Mbps.
Incidentally, do you take any other services from Virgin Media?
Are you asking me or Loki?
JimmyEatWorms
18-09-2007, 12:29
That is the thing with having a very fast line isn't it - what exactly are you going to do with it?
Same as everybody else does with loads of bandwidth. Wank themselves stupid :D
AboveTheSalt
18-09-2007, 12:33
Are you asking me or Loki?Either, both, whoever uses Virgin Media for Broadband. I am interested because I wonder to what extent VM uses loss leaders / cross subsidies to capture a greater share of the market for their various products?
Grimpster
18-09-2007, 12:40
im on the 20mb package at the moment but for me i`d be better off with something like 10mb down and 2mb up.
dirtydog
18-09-2007, 12:41
Yeah I think over 512k you really hit a law of diminishing returns re web browsing speeds. The thing that made the most noticeable difference to my browsing speeds was getting interleaving turned off - the lower latency made browsing noticeably snappier.
I am unfortunately restricted to 1.5Mb here - although I guess we are all spoilt nowadays as having the equivalent of a T1 downstream and 330 GB of bandwidth a month for twenty quid on a home line would have been unthinkable ten years ago. The only times I really wish it was faster is when downloading large files. For most of what I do, having a 50Mb line would make no difference.
Either, both, whoever uses Virgin Media for Broadband. I am interested because I wonder to what extent VM uses loss leaders / cross subsidies to capture a greater share of the market for their various products?
I use VM for all services for now. Previous to that I was SKY/BT/AOL. Best move I made. Service on all platforms I would be giving them a dis-service if I awarded it less than 8/10 across the board. The TV Now and what is coming in the future is more up my street. It was a bit of a bind loosing SkySports News but when you consider its all re-hashed stories and promotion of other Sky products then I am glad to see that ITN will be working in partnership for the new VirginMedia Sports News.
Sky One is no big loss at all. A few programmes I watched on there and that was it. Lost & 24 both of which were not to my liking. Give me HBO on demand any day of the week.
Having a 50Mbit BB service is like having an 18 inch cock.
It sounds ridiculously impressive, and everyone is jealous, but you'll never get to use more than half of it.
JimmyEatWorms
18-09-2007, 15:44
Don't be fooled, downstream is for marketing, it's the upstream which is the important bit, certainly for hosted services/applications. :)
Since that's not what the vast majority of Virgin customers will be doing i'd say that yes the downstream IS important.
I would sacrifice some downstream in return for better upstream
Yeah, my first adsl line was 512K and it took 4 hours to d/l a 440MB VCD file which was what most tv shows were encoded as 5 years ago. So I'd set the PC to d/l the file and go out/to work and watch it when I got home. Then upgraded to 2Mb and the d/l time is 1 hour, that's still something you set up then go do something else. Currently getting 3.5Mb and given the change from VCD to 360MB xvids means it only takes 20minutes to d/l a 42min TV show. That time I can happily waste simply by browsing the web.
As to general web browsing I noticed a big difference going from ISDL to ADSL (64Kb to 512Kb) but virtually no difference in going from 512Mb to 2Mb. Few web servers could utilise the extra b/w and a lot still cant. Not that shaving fractions of a second off a page load time has any real value to me.
So 20Mb would be pointless to me, given the services I use and the way I use them. Sure during October when I'll d/l 120GB of TV I could do it 6 times faster but given I can already d/l a program in less time than it takes me to watch what's the point? In fact by the time I've set up all my d/ls during a busy day the first program has often finished d/ling.
So for me it would be a waste of time until TV on demand actually has enough choice to justify the extra expense.
Just out of curiosity, where do you download your TV episodes from to be able to saturate your connection.
And I like iCraig would much prefer to have a larger upload speed than a larger download speed, 2MB (or 4 at uni) is fine for almost everything but the stupidly small uploads are really annoying.
Virgin media is really poor at upload speeds. If anything 10Mb was better for browsing than 20Mb is.
Usenet.
Shssh. The first rule of Usenet is not to mention Usenet.
AboveTheSalt
18-09-2007, 21:40
Usenet.Most ISPs seem only to offer text-based Usenet access - do you subscribe to a Usenet service?
I thought that most people downloaded TV episodes using torrents?
Ah I forgot about usenet.:o
I use torrents which although quite fast still take an hour or so for a tv episode. I can't bring myself to pay to download stuff that I could get legally by paying for it..;)
dirtydog
19-09-2007, 07:28
Yeah it seems odd to pay for usenet if you use it primarily for popular, recent TV programmes because they come down quick from torrents anyway.
Incidentally don't Virgin use traffic shaping and have a fair use policy? I also hear that their current 20Mb service regularly fails to reach anywhere near that speed due to contention issues, so I doubt the 50Mb will be very useful unless they upgrade their infrastructure somehow.
dirtydog
19-09-2007, 07:58
And by d/l from Usenet I don't have to worry about maintaining a copy for others to up load from me.
You don't have to anyway - I tend to remove them immediately if they are heavily seeded popular files. I will seed less popular files up to 1.0 and beyond out of courtesy though.
AboveTheSalt
19-09-2007, 09:28
[I subscribe to] two [Usenet services] plus my ISP's which I rarely bother with <snip>Are you willing to say which Usenet services you subscribe to?
£100pa seems like an awful lot of money :eek: What are you actually able to download from these services?
Why would you need encryption? Is it really worth an extra $5 a month?
dirtydog
19-09-2007, 13:57
What is the rationale behind it? I use encryption on my utorrent client but it didn't stop me getting a warning email from my ISP last year about downloading PC software (which I subsequently stopped doing).
I could probably see how a ISP could know you were downloading software as they/the owner could monitor the torrent, but how would they know what you are downloading from usenet? And do they monitor it?
dirtydog
19-09-2007, 17:57
I could probably see how a ISP could know you were downloading software as they/the owner could monitor the torrent, but how would they know what you are downloading from usenet? And do they monitor it?
They actually knew the filename of the PC game I was downloading as well.
FUCK ME
I would love 50 meg, 20 meg gets me a 4 gig in under 50 mins.
/me does some calculations
20 mins a for 4 gig
btw anybody want to get free 15gb off giganews give me a bell
Giganews has long offered a refer-a-friend program where you can earn credits for your Giganews account in exchange for referring your friends and family. This program has recently been expanded for a limited time to allow any new customer you refer to take advantage of a free 3 day Giganews trial account with 15GB of transfer!
They actually knew the filename of the PC game I was downloading as well.
I suspect that will be because the ISP was notified by one of the various bodies representing music/movies/games people who had been hosting the file and got your IP as one that was downloading the file from them - encryption wouldn't prevent that AFAIK. The ISP will be passing the information on from whoever supplied them with the info :)
With the newsgroups, unless the newsgroup hosters (i.e. giganews) release the info, and the d/load is encrypted, then I'm not sure that they could find out what you were downloading.
That's my understanding of things anyway :)
AboveTheSalt
21-09-2007, 13:15
It doesn't matter what the ISP say you've signed, the illegal act is the downloading of the material and if *you're* not downloading it, by definition *you're* not committing the illegal act.And the moral of this little story is ALWAYS to leave your WiFi insecure on the basis that you can then avoid responsibility for anything that was downloaded on your account but definitely not by you. "Oh no sir, it sure wasn't me". ;)
dirtydog
21-09-2007, 13:24
It doesn't matter what the ISP say you've signed, the illegal act is the downloading of the material and if *you're* not downloading it, by definition *you're* not committing the illegal act.
I don't believe this is a viable defence in law...
Not in the US its not.
Having your IP address is not sufficient under UK law. They would need to have your HD with the incriminating evidence on it. An IP address alone does not prove that YOU have been downloading software/games/etc.
Look at it this way, if it was practical for copyright holders to successfully prosecute people for downloading based solely on their IP address, why aren't thousands of people being prosecuted? Is it because the music industry, for example, are too "nice"? Perhaps not prosecute, but civil actions are certainly possible - lower burden of proof means you could get stung for damages & costs quite heftily.
You might want to have a look at:
Polydor & others -v- Brown & others (http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2005/3191.html&query=BPI&method=boolean)
(if you're really bored) :p
If you search through BAILII for 'BPI' there are quite a few judgements of a similar nature. *edit* or at least I thought there might have been..er Lawtel then :p
Difference is, they outline the terms of use. You give someone the tools, but it's made clear that you're not supposed to use those tools for evil. :p
Wireless networks should be made secure, unless you're prepared to take responsibility for what goes on when third parties access it. It's pretty basic stuff and has been talked about a lot in terms of people piggybacking on other's connections so ignorance isn't really an excuse IMO. You wouldn't buy a house and leave it unlocked would you? :p
But leaving your door unlocked is not a criminal offence. Neither is leaving your wifi unprotected a criminal offence. Whereas using a unprotected wifi without the authorisation of the owner is a criminal offence. You can only prosecute a person if you can prove it was them downloading copyright material. An IP address alone does not prove who downloaded the material, and therefore it is useless on its own to convict someone. You need more substantial evidence than an IP address.
You have to be guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.
I would also like to add that downloading copyright material is a civil matter anyway, and not a criminal matter.
Perhaps not prosecute, but civil actions are certainly possible - lower burden of proof means you could get stung for damages & costs quite heftily.
You might want to have a look at:
Polydor & others -v- Brown & others (http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2005/3191.html&query=BPI&method=boolean)
(if you're really bored) :p
If you search through BAILII for 'BPI' there are quite a few judgements of a similar nature. *edit* or at least I thought there might have been..er Lawtel then :p
"A sample of files was downloaded by the BPI from the computer, and after Mr Bowles was identified, the claimants' solicitors wrote and sent him a letter before action. Mr Bowles admitted that he had used P2P software, but was unaware that by doing so, he said, he was distributing music, and he said that he had had the software on his computer for about a year, and that his children had used it for downloading music."
I think that sums it up. You're pretty much fucked if you admit the charges against you in a civil or criminal court.
Aye the guy was a bit stupid :p
However, IIRC there's also some caselaw which basically say to the recording companies 'ok you say there are damages, prove it' i.e. ordering an enquiry into the losses suffered...which I imagine could prove rather tricky :)
dirtydog
21-09-2007, 16:58
So are we saying that all you have to do to avoid conviction in a civil case is say nothing and admit nothing?
No but that isn't really my point. If you leave your house unlocked and people use the house as a drug lab, the police are right to ask you why the hell you didn't do anything to stop them.
Big difference between a house and unprotected wireless. You would have a hard time explaining you didn't know that there were people in your basement or that you didn't notice people coming in and out of your house.
Whilst with WiFi you might not even know that your connection has been shared. If ever, if the people sharing it are savvy enough about wiping logs from the router.
I am not missing any point. It is not illegal to leave your house unlocked. Nor is it illegal to leave encryption of your wifi. (And lets be honest, neither lock are 100% secure). The only one commiting illegal acts are those who enter your house without permission or use your wifi without your permission. You are not responsible for the actions of third parties.
And no, you cannot be convicted for being stupid.
That should be your response to all legal problems, followed by getting a lawyer to represent you.
Indeed, good advice there. Do not say anything until your solicitor arrives.
So are we saying that all you have to do to avoid conviction in a civil case is say nothing and admit nothing?
Always admit nothing DD. They have to prove you're guilty, you don't have to prove you're innocent.
I know it's not illegal, but if you've paid for a connection surely because it now belongs to you, you're responsible to what happens to it? By broadcasting unsecured wireless you're essentially enabling third party users to use it. You shouldn't do that unless you're prepared to take responsibility for what happens on it. If you don't want to, you secure it. It's the reason why the protection is there in there in the first place.
If I leave my front door open I am openly showing my goods to the world but this doesn't give people the right to sneak in and take them. Again, I am not responsible for the actions of 3rd parties, no matter how you feel it is my responsibility.
If you leave your shed unlocked and someone steals your bike and then commits a crime with it are you responsible? Of course not.
If you leave your shed unlocked and your bike goes missing, it isn't directly your fault, but you can be accused of making it very easy for the thief to get away with it, and thus, any insurance you had on the bike, would most likely be void.
Ah, but not being insured is completely different than being guilty of a crime that someone else has committed purely because you didn't lock something.
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