Virgin Media 1gb broadbands soon?

How soon will Virgin Media be offfering 1gb broadbnads to residents customers?

Discuss....

We haven't even reached 100mbit yet, it's a long way off.

Years and years away - the tech over an HFC network doesn't exist at this time. There's also no commercial driver at all for such a deployment, BT are procrastinating over offering anything above 24Mbit to most and a small FTTC deployment won't come anywhere near 100Mbit let alone 1Gbit.

VM do what is necessary to beat BT, and LLU as LLU gains footprint, really no point at all in attempting 1Gbit which can only really be accomplished via fibre to the home not to mention that they don't have the cash to do it. DOCSIS 3 was a relatively modest investment next to the billions to convert the HFC network to full fibre.

A decade or more away I'd guesstimate but certainly not in the foreseeable future due to our ILEC BT being idle biatches not interested in anything bar shareholder returns and our regulator OFCOM being more interested in exchange based competition through LLU than any kind of next generation network. OFCOM's major driver is competition and any NGN would be subject to extensive regulation substantially reducing the viability of the business case for such an investment.

OFCOM's belief is that competition brings wonderful things, sadly in our case it's brought a sea of mediocrity and competition on price rather than quality as the mass of cheap and really rather crappy broadband options available to us illustrates.

Yes I consider 24Mbit ADSL2+ to be crappy by the way, years old technology that's distance dependant. We really do need deeper fibre networks and BT's investment isn't nearly great enough though it's probably about the best they could do having to accomodate OFCOM and shareholders in one go.

That some other countries have 100Mbit and 1Gbit in metropolitan areas without any kind of government investment while BT make a huge issue of 40Mbit FTTC and people worship Virgin Media over a 50Mbit/1.5Mbit offer disgusts me considering we're alledgedly the 5th richest country in the world. Every other one of the 8 richest countries in the world (Canada is 9th) has a not inconsiderable fibre to the home rollout, and the other members of the top 5 all have FTTH available on a commercial basis.

Both Virgin Media's future packages and our current ones are symptomatic of OFCOM's policy of regulating to ensure 'choice' though when the choice is between various varieties of mediocrity it's not exactly a great one.

Edited by deleted (Sun 21-Dec-08 19:37:45)

Hang on a minute please.

How many consumer Windows PC's (installed) are gigabit ethernet enabled?

Some Macs were 5 years ago like mine when a home gigabit network cost more than a decent gigabit enabled computer. Most Macs of the past three years are including the new consumer MacBooks.

All Macs except the mini have been 802.11n (NNN) ready (draft) for the past two or more years, some before. Not so for most Windows PCs.

It is premature to be talking in terms of 100 mbs plus Internet access in the UK.

So, I like your introductory and realistic statement and can only sympathize with your concluding remarks.

Seasons greetings.

Need a recipe?

Sid

My 3 year old PC, and my laptop have onboard gigabit ethernet port incorporated onto the motherboard, as would I imagine any PC produced since that time. Even though probably most aren't capable of 1000Mbit they nonetheless are capable of that at physical layer across the cables.

My realistic statement was that it's commercial reasons rather than strictly technological that prevent the introduction of over 100Mbit/s internet access, note that UPC are rolling out a 120Mbit downstream tier through the Netherlands with the rest of their European footprint, Republic of Ireland included, to follow in 2009.

I need no recipe, I have plenty *hic*

Seasons greetings to yourself as well and thank you Sid.