Virgin Media Make New 350Mbps UK Broadband Package Available
Cable ISP Virgin Media has today made their new 350Mbps (20Mbps upload) home broadband tier available to order, which replaces the old 300Mbps package. Existing customers already taking VIVID 300 will be automatically transferred onto VIVID 350 “at no extra cost“.
The new package has technically been available since last year, although officially it was only announced in February 2018 (here) and until today you wouldn’t have been able to see it advertised on the public front end of Virgin Media’s website.
The service currently costs from £41 per month for the first 12 months (£48 thereafter or on a 30 day contract) as a standalone broadband-only product, including the usual one-off £20 activation fee (£65 on a 30 day term). You can of course also take it as a bundle with phone and or TV services, albeit at extra cost.
Anthony Vollmer, VM’s Executive Director for Connectivity, said:
“We’ve always been proud of our network’s speed and for good reason. Our lines bring blazingly fast download speeds which are leagues ahead of those our customers could find elsewhere. We have been the speed leader since 2007: We intend to remain at the front of the pack.”
The new package will help to keep Virgin Media ahead of Openreach’s residential focused 330Mbps capable G.fast and FTTP tiers at the level of national coverage and bragging rights. However, it should be said that there are now a rapidly growing number of FTTH/P “full fibre” broadband providers, which can deliver speeds of 1Gbps+ in certain parts of the UK.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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I like how VM advertise it as 350 when in reality it’s more than that. Most of the time I do a Speedtest, if I can find a fast enough server, I can easily do 390Mbit down. If I download a well seeded torrent I can often go above 400Mbit.
They set the profile rate a fair bit higher than the advertised rate, so technically you could view 350Mbps as (under ideal conditions) being closer to a 400Mbps tier. Of course not everybody experiences that and others will suffer slower speeds.
They publish ‘average’ speeds on their website. By setting the rate limit higher they can use people that are getting full performance to compensate for those who aren’t, thereby increasing the average.
It’s a bonus for sure, though sadly born out of cynical marketing rather than any kind of altruism.
@CarlIT. Capitalism is built upon people’s self-interest being beneficial for the commons on aggregate. This is an excellent example of that working out.
http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest always maxes me out around 384/385
Ive had this for month – no compaints here
Interesting – I’ve been on Virgin Business since mid 2017 – 350mb/7mbps for £36 per month.
Just had another look on the VB site – 350 for £32 (ex VAT I think – so actually £38.40) but still only 7 up – looking acros the board I think 350 download is easy – the price differences are for upload speeds – a 20mb upload package is £60 per month.
The problem is going to be that 2.4ghz connections seem to top out at 50mbps – 5.0ghz gets to 200 and only wired will go all the way to 350.
The problem with most Wi-Fi is that it doesn’t always give the best speeds out of the box. Often it needs setting up properly in order to achieve the desired speeds. This is more the case with 2.4ghz and you should get way higher than 50mbps using that band if it’s setup correctly.
And no – I’m not actually a business – just a regular joe consumer
So am I feeling a bit unreasonable here…
Yes I am.
Proud of the network’s speed my backside. VM spend the bare minimum they have to on both local and core networks.
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/1521658408874774255
Is my performance on the highest business broadband tier. I am in an area that was only built last year. There is absolutely no technical reason why it’s slow at peak times, it’s simply because:
1) The CPE is sucks, slowing things down all the time though it’s much worse at peak.
2) The other end of the static IP GRE tunnel sucks, chosen because Liberty Global invested in that company, not because it’s the best equipment for the job.
3) The area doesn’t have adequate bandwidth for the demand and VM have continued to sell door to door regardless.
This area, in common with other Lightning new build HFC (not FTTP!) areas, was built with a fibre node per ~500 premises passed. VM combined the node my service runs on with 2 others, sharing capacity between all the customers in ~1500 premises passed.
When I was first installed there was a downstream capacity problem. All the premises were running on a shared 800Mb of capacity. This was resolved by introducing 8 new channels, bringing capacity to 1,200Mb.
Then an upstream capacity problem. This was resolved by moving from 2 bonded upstream channels to 4, spreading load.
There are capacity issues again now, as usage has gone up and the sales guys have been doing their thing. This in the space of 5 months.
This is the ‘ring fenced’ Project Lightning monies meeting the rest of the company’s attitude towards capital expenditure. Spending a thousand pounds per premises passed building a network to then run a degraded service over that network in order to save a few pounds per premises passed.
That felt good. I’m done now.
carl@HP-Microserver:~$ wget -O /dev/null http://speedtest.tele2.net/1GB.zip
–2018-03-22 12:11:42– http://speedtest.tele2.net/1GB.zip
Resolving speedtest.tele2.net (speedtest.tele2.net)… 90.130.70.73, 2a00:800:1010::1
Connecting to speedtest.tele2.net (speedtest.tele2.net)|90.130.70.73|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 1073741824 (1.0G) [application/zip]
Saving to: ‘/dev/null’
/dev/null 100%[=============================================================================>] 1.00G 1.04MB/s in 21m 3s
2018-03-22 12:32:45 (830 KB/s) – ‘/dev/null’ saved [1073741824/1073741824]
@ CarlT i hope you feel better after that, it does feel better to vent it out 🙂
Mike will be along shortly to check if you used the gold plated monster ethernet cable from the server & gold plated coax cable from the router.
If their service is poor in your area, the only language they will understand is the language of switching to an OpenReach network if available in your area.
Yup, I’ve suggested they come and collect their equipment.
100ms jitter and these speeds this evening:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/1522009013457481555
“Mike will be along shortly to check if you used the gold plated monster ethernet cable from the server & gold plated coax cable from the router.”
If you mean me, then i have told you before i have no issues with people reporting problems of any ISP product and showing supporting information to show the problem (IE a speedtest at minimum). CarlT has done just that so i have no reason to question anything he has to say. So sorry to disappoint you and your regular rude idiot logic.
I meant the other Mike
lol.
You can’t mean me so you must mean the other other mike
They really need to improve that upload speed. At the very least offer faster speeds to FTTP areas.
Weirdly in a number of cases that wouldn’t even require spending any money, the group tasked with bonding more upstream channels just haven’t done it.
that would be nice.
They’d be better off having a USP of better upstream than Openreach instead of just responding to G.fast download speeds being rolled out.
Also, where is IPv6 at. It’s getting silly now…