Virgin Media is urging existing customers on its 20Mbit/s broadband service to splurge a one-off payment of £30 to upgrade to its 30Mbit/s offering, which launched today.

The company will no longer offer would-be punters the 20Mbit/s package, but existing customers do not have to upgrade to the new service as Virgin Media will keep both bases running.

It claimed the firm's 'XL' broadband offering had been "boosted by 50 per cent" in additional bandwidth without coming at an extra cost.

Existing customers might be attracted to hitting the upgrade button, if they agree with Virgin Media's blurb that the 50 per cent bandwidth increase would be good for households running several internet-connected devices at once.

The service will set customers back £18.50 per month when bundled with a Virgin Media home phone, said the network provider.

Existing customers who decide to upgrade from the 20Mbit/s service to the new 30Mbit/s offering, assuming they have access to its fibre optics network, will be charged £30, to cover activation and exchange of their old modem and router for Virgin Media's DOCSIS 3.0-loaded kit.

From today, the company is dishing up 10Mbit/s, 30Mbit/s, 50Mbit/s and 100Mbit/s broadband services, with 20Mbit/s effectively shelved by Virgin Media.

The firm has been slowly rolling out maximum downstream broadband speed available via its network to 100Mbit/s, and maximum upload speed to 10Mbit/s. The whole process is expected to be completed by Virgin Media in mid-2012.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/01 ... b_service/

Well I am about to dump Virgin. So this will not interest me. It was the daytime caps which annoyed me more than anything else. I can understand peak hours in the evening but it was 12 hours a day that the caps applied.

Thats some serious downloading there.
I would have to download:
7000MB (10am-3pm)
3500MB (4pm-9pm)
to be capped
upload 3000gb (3pm-8pm)
Which I think is a quite reasonable allocation. But then again I tend to do mainly light surfing (FB etc) and CS:S not the most data intensive applications. If I want to download something big I set it up to go overnight.

I have managed 250Gb over a weekend and working around the caps. I was hit by the upload cap last time. 20 Gb per day. They do not count traffic outside the 9 am to 9 pm period. Just looking at my usage in the last 11 months and it is downloading 5TB and uploading 2Tb.

Does the phrase WTF! mean anything. Im sure thats would be classed as buisness and not residential usage, no wonder your entering the world of capping.

I have always been a heavy user. When I was on dial up I was among the networks heaviest user. That was well before torrents or streaming.

TBH I have the 10mbps service and it's plenty fast enough.

Then stop moaning about being throttled. If you're not going to reduce your usage then get a better tariff.
You can't bitch and moan at the ISP because they throttle you when you use as much bandwidth as a small business on a standard consumer package.

Mark

I am not being throttled. I download at a greatly reduced rate during the day. Then drop speeds still further at 6pm and switch to browsing then.

I am switching Virgin do not serve the area where I am moving to. I have already picked out my call and broadband packages. It will also be a lot cheaper. I actually have not moaned about the evening peaks and I do curtail my usage during the peak hours 4pm to 10pm though I also notice glitches right the way till midnight.