Virgin Ramps Up Net Speeds For Free

Cable Broadband provider Virgin Media is about to start rolling out a speed increase for its customers, and the good news is, it’s going to be free!

From February 2012, customers of Virgin Media’s broadband service will start to see a sizable increase in speed or their already fast fibre-optic cable Internet connection.

For customers with 10Meg, 20Meg, 30Meg or 50Meg download speeds, these will effectively be doubled at no extra charge, whilst those on 100Meg will see a boost to up to 120Meg.

Virgin Media’s cable service currently offers the fastest broadband in the UK. When the 120Mbps update starts, they’ll be offering a service three times faster than BT’s current best speed, which is the 40Mbps service known as BT Infinity.

Virgin expects to complete the upgrade of their network to the new faster connection speeds by the middle of 2013, and the upgrades will cost a reported £110 million.

Speed increases will no doubt be welcomed by Virgin’s customer base, although as reported in our December show, only a small number of customers appear to be making use of high-speed downloads. As was discussed at the Internet Industry Insight Session, there aren’t that many consumer services out there that can really benefit from such fast download speeds – At least, not yet. This month, we’ve seen Netflix start in the UK, offering an impressively large collection of movies and TV shows for on-demand playback – video will certainly require a decent amount of bandwidth, but even live HD streams won’t get close to touching 120Mbps, and neither will current gaming services such as OnLive.

Nonetheless, if mega-fast broadband is your thing and you want to connect using anything over 40Mbps, then Virgin is the answer, and the doubling of speed is sure a good thing – it’ll also help the UK Government get closer to their target of getting the UK connected to a faster broadband network.

Personally, rather than seeing a speed boost, which is essentially just a headline-grabber for Virgin, we’d like to see them expand their network. If customers aren’t taking advantage of the faster network – rather than paying out to double the speed, how about bringing the service to a few other users? It’s been a while since the network expanded, and there’s lots of people out there close to a Virgin network, but not close enough. Here are FrequencyCast, we’re about a mile away from you, Virgin. Give us the fibre cable, and we’ll run it for you… no guarantees on how neat a job our lads will do, or how many folk will trip over it, but if it means we can play our OnLive games a tiny bit faster, then we’re in!

For more information on the speed enhancements, and to check if Virgin’s mega-whooshy network is available where you are, go to www.virginmedia.com