Virgin Broadband set to soar to 200Mbps

In recent years Virgin Media’s adoption of NTL and Telewest has resulted in many of their customers getting a much improved service from adding the Virgin On Demand service to XL customers for free providing them with a wealth of programmes which they can watch at the drop of a hat to cheaper phone calls and call plans that rival some of the best mobile phone contracts.

In the past few years they have hired the services of actor Samuel L Jackson to promote their Broadband internet service touting better broadband for everyone with fibre optic cabling as opposed to the ancient copper wiring in place with most other providers. The fibre optic signal is not affected over distance and ensures a strong signal for all customers not those nearest to telephone exchanges.

This has become a sticking point for many keen broadband fanatics who when on copper cabling the further away from the local telephone exchange you live then the weaker the signal and the less speed you’ll likely achieve. Virgin has used this new promise to their advantage able to push the speed of their service up to 50Mbps at the moment, the fastest available for UK homes, or so we thought.

Virgin has recently announced they plan to upgrade their network to a blistering 200Mbps speed and this isn’t dreams of the future, this should be in place by next year (2010). The timing of this announcement overshadows the plans for rival BT’s own fibre network set for completion in 2012 which would take their maximum speed to 40/60Mbps.

The 200MB figure is apparently only a theoretical limit and they think that a download speed of 100Mbps is entirely possible in the near future with the cooperation of application and content providers. Of course many customers are sceptical that they will ever see speeds like this as the often disputed actual speed of broadband means that we normally only get a fraction of the advertised speed.

You won’t find Virgin’s customers complaining though as they are at the moment paying on a three tier system where they have M, L and XL speeds, currently these sit at 10, 20 and 50Mbps respectively but every time Virgin Media has upgraded their network speeds the customers have not had to pay a penny more. Effectively they receive a service increase every year or so or whenever Virgin performs these speed increases.

The best way to measure your Broadband speed is to use some sort of broadband speed test, try not to use any bandwidth intensive services like video downloading whilst carrying out these tests. Many people have switched their internet providers in light of seeing that they are getting speeds massively under the advertised speed. Hearing from customers of other providers is often the deciding factor and if possible you should ask around friends and family members how fast their provider is.

If you are able to find another provider offering greater speeds in your area then maybe it’s time you switched your provider, with networks like BT and Virgin increasing their speeds through new technologies like fibre cabling then hopefully the speeds will increase and be the same wherever you live.