Virgin Media 50Mb broadband arrives

Posted by Al Warmington on Mon 15 Dec 2008

Rival BT is only just beginning its testing phase

Today, Virgin Media will be assuming the admirable title of Britain’s first 50 Megabits per second domestic broadband service. Its all new super-duper-fast broadband trounces the second fastest internet connection speed, 24Mb, provided by Be Unlimited.

At a press conference being held this morning Virgin will officially take the wraps off the service, which has recently completed trials in Kent recently. It is not yet known which areas will have access to the lighting-quick broadband, nor how much it will cost.

As internet usage increases and more and more sophisticated web services put greater demands on internet bandwidth, fibre optic is seen as a way around the crippling limitations of the ancient copper phone networks. BT has recently begun trialling a similar high speed service in London and Cardiff. It is experimenting with installing fibre optic cables as far as the street cabinets and only using the copper lines to connect from homes to the cabinets. It is hoped this will deliver speeds of up to 40Mb.

Although Virgin is now easily topping the UK ISP speed league, some say that even it is not going far enough to meet the increasing speed demands of internet users. Speaking to the BBC, president of the Fibre to the Home Council of Europe, Joeri Van Bogaert, said “Cable modem can be complementary to fibre to the home (FTTH) but is in no way a substitute.” “While FTTH can easily deliver speeds of up to 100Mbps and could eventually pump out 1000Mbps, Virgin's service offers 50Mbps and is asymmetric.” "This means that uploading content will be much slower than download speeds," he added.

Link: Virgin Media (via TechRadar)

Sign up for the free T3 newsletter