Virgin Media has said it plans to make its 100Mbits/sec broadband available to 13 million UK homes by the middle of next year.

The promise comes as Virgin's top-level service passed the 1m homes mark, as engineers upgraded equipment on the network.

“The first homes to get this service went live last December and we've already hit 1m homes where it is available,” a Virgin Media spokesperson told PC Pro. “We're working our way around the country, but we need to go to each local area and make adjustments at the street cabinet level.”

According to Virgin, the 13m homes would represent just over half of UK residences, and would put the UK on track to meet the EU's target of half of all homes in member states having next-generation access technology available by 2018.

Perhaps more importantly, it also steals a march on BT, which is currently involved in a £2.5bn fibre rollout, which it says will reach two-thirds of UK homes by 2015.

While Virgin claims the upgrade will be available across its entire network, BT is initially limiting the number of street cabinets being upgraded, with only 60% of cabinets being lit up in some areas.

Virgin's 100Mbits/sec package costs £45 per month when bought as a sole product, and also boasts 10Mbits/sec upload speeds.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadband/3 ... rk-by-2012

'Whataya mean you wanna actually use it?'

Great but their caps during 9am to 9pm really gut the service. I switched to Sky and have unlimited downloads no fair usage caps and no throttling. It is what the internet should be.

If you're happy to pay for it.
Me: I like usage caps, and reduced priority for P2P as I don't use it. The result for me is very cheap ADSL that meets my needs. I can still watch iPlayer etc.

I have no problem paying for it. It is cheaper than what I was paying virgin for, even the same speed. The market is split into different users, with different needs so why try and be all things to all people? Why not have a gamers package which is fast for games but penalises bit torrent and streaming. The same can be reversed for other users. For those that just want to browse and use email have a service that does that but is cheaper. Allow customers to pay for the type of service that they want, rather than be a jack of all trades and master of none.

If you can get decent speeds from Sky then great; ours was no better than when were with BT - no surprise really as it comes over the same wires. AFAIK the Virgin 50Mbit and 100Mbit plans are uncapped, though P2P traffic is restricted at peak times - not my thing so <shrug>

I moved house recently and went from a cable virgin broadband connection to an ADSL connection (still with Virgin).

Since then the connection has been up and down, sometimes is unusable, soemtimes disconnects entirely. I have never once received the 10Mbit connection I pay for and on cable it rarely ever went below 10Mbit.

As soon as I can I will be changing to cable again.

I'm moving from ADSL to Virgin cable. Can't really argue with 50Mb/s on Virgin vs 3Mb/s on ADSL2+. However so far they've managed to send me a form email without filling the bits in and given me an install date different from the two dates they asked for when I applied for the service . Hope the installers are a bit more up to the mark...

Jon

Well they botch it regularly. I have not come across a single painless install with Virgin yet. Though once it is up and running it is is usually faultless.

The install into my flat was relativly painless. Once they found the cabling into the property had been cleaved into two by the council putting up a new advertising sign, they had engineers round connecting the flat in a very short time. In fact both times we have been connected upto virgin I would say their service has been fantastic.
Their help lines on the otherhand are only good if you get to speak to the English lot, their overseas call centres are aweful.

<raises hand> Had a near-faultless install from them about a month ago; the only glitch was that the installer couldn't log me in to authorise the connection, so did something to bypass it and get everything up and running, which in turn means I don't currently have an @virginmedia email addy getting inundated with offers from Virgin after me to take their 'phone and telly packages. Shame

But yes, rock steady connection once all authorised and sorted; well impressed.

Although it was postponed a couple of times, I too had a painless Virgin cable installation. It's still rock solid a year on.

I think Amnesia10 is just unlucky.

+1 for the faultless install and service.

I've had VM Cable for over 2 years now, and won't look back. Install happened when they said it would, and I actually get 12mbps out of a 10mbps line. Yes, I sometimes get throttled during the day, but then it's my own fault for downloading lots of linux distros. and lots of games through Steam.

I had it for more than 4 years. The initial installation was delayed twice and then problems with the cable when they did do it. Though once it was up and running I only lost a signal a couple of times when the entire area was hit. The speed was pretty consistent until they decided to start throttling during peak hours. Even if you kept within the limits it was not a problem.