So Virgin Media in the UK have been hyping up a Download speed increase for about a month now..
Finally, we receive an email on the details. We watch a long ad with a popular r&b artist from the UK with footage of a child (of course) watching streams on her tablet.. The ad finally ends with a new marketing term "vivid" to make it sound all magical..
We're getting a maximum speed increase from 152mb/s (don't ask me why the 2) to 200Mb.. WOW! I'm astonished! (insert kappa here)
Seriously Virgin? I mean you run a big ad campaign about your DOCSIS 3 technology the "magic in our cables" but when it comes to it you give us a maximum or 200Mb? Bravo Virgin, bravo..
More marketing too, they're no longer calling it "superfast broadband" which it never was in the first place, its now being called ULTRAFAST broadband..
Germany: Where I live, there are three options: Telekom: up to theoretically 16Mbit/s (more like: Lucky day: 13Mbit/s, average day: 10Mbit/s) EWE-Tel: up to 50Mbit/s KabelDeutschland Fibre: 100Mbits/s And now tell me, your connection is slow! If I lived in a forgotten village in the middle of nowhere I would not complain but... There is a medium-big city starting one street to the left!
Yeah, I kinda agree with CrossCarbon here. I'm paying $130 for 35 Mbps and a 500 GB cap. Not saying that we all shouldn't have 1 Gbps by now, but I'd be okay with 200 Mbps.
For what it's worth, the 152Mb was sold as such purely for marketing reasons. The main competing product would be the effectively 80/20 FTTC service based on the Openreach network, which the majority of other ISPs such as BT/Sky/TalkTalk/Zen/Plusnet etc have to sell as 76Mb/s download, as whilst the sync may be at 80 a customer will never see 80Mb/s throughput.
VM therefore marketed their product as 152Mb to be able to claim that they were "2x as fast" as the competition, even though they actually provision slightly faster speeds and its possible to get to low 160's on that package. Any increase is always nice however, although I'm sure I'm not the only one who wishes they'd have put more emphasis on upload.. 200/12 which gets throttled to 200/4 if you upload any decent amount of data (for example streaming) in "peak times" aka after 4pm on weekdays and 11am onwards on weekends aren't exactly good ratios..
Yup, and the biggest defence I've heard for it is that its due to the nature of DOCSIS, though that doesn't explain why companies in other countries including US also using cable/DOCSIS networks are able to have better ratios (though the companies in AUS have even worse shrug).
I might be missing something as far as Euro DOCSIS versus whatever is used in the US, but I'm sure they could do a better job of not throttling the already poor upload by 65% if they were so inclined, rather than trying to push headline grabbing download speeds which can't always be achieved due to certain areas suffering congestion issues for extended lengths of time, that will likely resurface now that they're pushing the network harder with the new product tiers..
Funny because its 10 years old. Im guessing one of the big reasons for this is IPv6. 200 will be because of over-provisioning, new technology doesnt matter if you dont have the infrastructure to carry it. I imagine this will increase once BT start rolling out 500Mbit.
I hate the stupid marketing terms from all sides. To anyone remotely technically oriented, there just silly and unrepresentative.
Thats better than here. 200 mb per person? At least you're lucky to HAVE that. It's not like here where I am always getting throttled to 2 MBPS by comcast.
Screw you and your Bougie expectations.
Edit: I should have 55 down burst, 35 down constant
In bakersfield, CA (USA). Just getting internet set up. AT&T has 12/6 for 65 dollars, local isp called Brighthouse has 150/5 for 50. I just wish parallel up and down was mandated for ISP's.
4 down 0.5up ... ¬_¬" but i could upgrade to carrier over pidgeon iff there was more than just 1 ISP available anywhere... which is not the case here. welcome to south amurica where for every dollar something is worth we almost pay 2.
Where I'm from, "high speed" is considered anything over 25Mbps, and even then you're not guaranteed that.
We recently switched to 75Mbps because my parents got rid of cable and started doing strictly streaming, and the 18Mbps they had wasn't cutting it with four people in the house gaming and streaming. For whatever reason we were only getting around 20Mbps so we called AT&T and they said that 20 was within their acceptable threshold for 75Mbps internet. We were like are you fucking serious?? That's less than a third of the advertised speed, but apparently it's acceptable to them.
So less than a week later we switched to Comcast because they were having a deal on their 150Mbps internet and it was the same price as AT&T's 75Mbps. We were actually getting about 80-120Mbps on 2.4GHz depending on where you were in the house, and sometimes up to 175Mbps on 5GHz. Needless to say we were relatively impressed.
Lesson learned (at least where I'm from): ISP's all suck. You just have to shop around and see who's running the best deals at the time. A lot of them do like 50% off for 6 months or whatever and there's no contract, so once you're almost to that 6 month mark just switch to a different plan or ISP with whatever new deal they're running at the time.
The only totally awesome ISP I've ever had was Wave Broadband in Silverdale, WA. They even paid me back one time because they lowered their pricing AND raised the speed for the plan I was on, but forgot to change my bill, and I didn't even know about it, but they told me and paid me back the difference without me even having to ask them about it. Then again, I lived on base so we were like their highest priority because they were the only ISP allowed on base. I know other people who lived off base and they said their customer service was good but their internet quality was pretty bad.
Wow, the world really is behind the times.. I know I should be happy with what we get but the problem is, we have the technology, but it just isn't being used because at the moment, there is just no competition in the UK.
There are people in the UK too that are stuck on sub 3Mb/s ADSL connections, and I was using my phone's 3G tethered to my PC as it was faster than the home internet connection 2 years ago, so it's not just other countries that are behind.. Am I happy with 200Mb, yes, however other people elsewhere having it worse does not make services and companies immune to complaints... There's also other people in my city with symmetric gigabit, so of course there's room for improvement.
If they would have spent some of the money that went to rebranding and marketing the exact same technology as if it was something new in order to fool people on, oh I dunno, actually upgrading some of the infrastructure, maybe I would have kept the 300/20 profile I had a month ago in testing before they realised that the network wasn't going to take that kind of throughput because guess what? They haven't upgraded enough, and had to back down the customer profiles..
Frankly your getting a speed upgrade from an already super-above the world average speeds, for no upgrade fee, and then complaining. I've no pity. I got an upgrade from 60Mbps to 90Mbps down and I was ecstatic because I didn't pay a cent more, and got more for my money. Who cares what the marketing is, your still getting more for your money and not having to put any work into it.
Bloody hell, stop moaning. It's not the best but it's a lot better than other places. It's a matter of luxury really. 200Mb is very fast, yes the upload is a disappointment but things could be a lot worse.
