Virgin launch 50 Mbits/s cable service for £51/month
Virgin Media have launched their 50 Mbits/s downstream cable service, which will will be rolled out country-wide over the next six months. About half of the UK population live in areas served by Virgin’s hybrid fibre/coax cable network. Price for the standalone service is £51/month compared to £36/month for the XL 20 Mbits/s service (currently discounted to £29/month for first 12 months). There is a £50 activation fee for the new service in addition to installation charges starting at £30.
Inevitably there are price reductions through bundling broadband with a phone line or other Virgin services. At the time of writing the Virgin Media website does not list the 50M service and bundle options alongside the other services, and the dedicated web page is failing to respond no doubt due to high load.
The new service includes a DOCSIS 3.0 modem to deliver the higher speed, and a wireless-N router to provide matching wireless bandwidth. Another feature of the service is that it will be “an unlimited service with no traffic management at launch (acceptable use policy still applies)” so at least in the beginning the users will not be subject to peak time usage monitoring and throttling.
An interesting snippet in the press release is that “Virgin Media’s average customer data consumption is up 81% from 4.7 GB to 8.6 GB per month over the last 18 months.” If this 8.6 GB is downloaded in 2 hours per night uniformly across the month then the average bandwidth used is about 350 kbits/s (0.35 Mbits/s) so the average user won’t be stressing a 2M connection let alone a new 50M link.
The BBC pre-announced the launch on the Today programme this morning, and the BBC News website also carried free publicity in the form of a pre-launch item in the early hours “Virgin Media is widely expected to unveil a 50 Megabits per second (Mbps) domestic broadband service today.” The BBC News website now has an updated news item covering the launch although some may take issue with the headline describing the service as “Next Generation”.
Tags: Virgin Media
December 16th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Does anyone know what is the upstream speed Virgin Media will offer with this XXL product?
Hopefully better than the 1M upload limit currently on XL…
December 17th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
I believe the launch upstream speed is 1.5Mbits/s, with potential to increase by using more frequency bandwidth.