Broadband ISP Virgin Media Business UK Boosting Upload Speeds
Existing customers Virgin Media Business UK (VMO2), specifically those who take their Voom 600Mbps, 800Mbps and 1Gps service tiers, may be pleased to learn that the provider has today officially confirmed that they’re getting a boost to upload speeds – reflecting a ’10:1 Download to Upload’ speed ratio across all Voom packages.
The move won’t come as much of a surprise to our readers, because the operator had already informed us last year that they planned to do something like this (here) and existing customers had also reported seeing a similar performance uplift on several packages (here). Not to mention that it follows after their consumer division, Virgin Media, performed a similar upgrade for residential users.
The “free” upgrade is naturally also available to new customers, and we’ve summarised what this means below, albeit using their advertised rates rather than the profile speeds of each package. Each package includes a router, 24-month contract term and the 600Mbps to 1 Gig tiers also add Static IP addresses, as well as shorter repair times if problems occur.
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OLD vs NEW VMB Package Speeds (Prices +VAT)
Voom 400Mbps – £33 per month
OLD: 40Mbps
NEW: UnchangedVoom 600Mbps – £42 per month
OLD: 50Mbps
NEW: 60MbpsVoom 800Mbps – £51 per month
OLD: 50Mbps
NEW: 80MbpsVoom 1 Gig / sec – £60 per month
OLD: 50Mbps
NEW: 100Mbps
Take note that in some areas the maximum upload speed will, according to VMB, initially still be up to 50Mbps but will automatically increase to the speed available within the updated packages once the network in your area has been upgraded during 2023.
Chris Holmes, Director of SOHO at VMO2, said:
“For small businesses, every second truly matters and by boosting our small business customers’ upload speeds for free we can help make their lives easier without the expensive price tag. Our customers such as The Camden Watch Company depend on speed and reliability to serve and interact their own customers, which is why we’re proud to further enhance our offering and deliver on our promise to speed up the UK’s broadband.”
Inevitably, Virgin Media’s residential customers, specifically those who take their top 1Gbps (52Mbps upload) and 500Mbps (36Mbps upload) broadband plans, will now want to know how long they’ll have to wait before being able to get a similar upload boost.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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What do they want? A prize? For just providing what is generally considered the bare minimum ratio at long last?
Knowing Virgin Media, yes they will want ‘ISP of the Year’ for providing scraps to their customers…..
Wouldn’t touch the clowns with a barge pole.
At least they had a sort of technical reason behind it (upload channeling on DOCSIS3.1), whereas Openreach FTTP has absolutely no technical reason behind offering 100Mbps out of 1244Mbps on the GPON trees.
Couldn’t agree more.
BT do have a reason. Its protecting their lucrative leased line business and restricting what the public can do (yet again). It’s a dinosaur company remember, way past it’s best before date.
Normal households next please
By the time this comes to residential customer I’ll probably be fre of VM due to al alt net offering 900/900 £30pm
Me too. Want to sue the Ofcom rule about price increases during contract to exit and go to Netomnia because it’s symmetric and much cheaper with less latency.
Just wondering what whether Netominia will cable us in Temple Ewell as heard they can be patchy with coverage. They built the Netomnia branded pavement chamber about 120M away in an alleyway to train station cut through a few weeks ago – but seemed to have stalled according to roadworks.org and concentrating on main part of Dover (again). Hoping they will return soon 🙂
Up in Whitfield here and they haven’t really touched the older side of Whitfield at all (CK Civils on behalf of Netonmia) which leaves me fearful – especially as my BT line (which I don’t use) is provided by a UK Power Networks telegraph pole rather than a BT one which might cause issues for PIA I assume which might mean they don’t bother coming down my road… Emailed them a few times and just get told that they’re currently in the design phase which makes no sense to me if they’re laying their core backbone
They’ve done work near the Archers Court exchange, and more work 21-27 Feb there. The rest of the work was closer to the big Whitefield roundabout and Whitfield Hill road towards Kearsney. Only seen BT doing work more North of Whitfield.
Equally though, no work done in West Dover Folkestone Road, Maxton, Clarendon, Elms Vale as yet.
Dan, Check the Netomnia coverage checker again.
Temple Ewell was added as coming last night and River had had lots of streetworks added.
I had read that SHARED use poles (i.e. electric and telephone) have been an issue in some areas but I think they then put up their own pole but causes a small delay once they realise.
Why do UK “Fibre Providers” still provide asymmetrical speeds? I thought the point of a pure fire connection was to get symmetrical speeds. Or is it just another case of Ripoff Britain.
Virgin use DOCSIS and are not a “pure fibre” provider, yet. They’re working to move to GPON, although this inherently has contention too.
They’re moving to XGS-PON by 2028.
!remindme January 1st 2028
If theyre not offering 1tbps symmetrical, lowest latencies and first mover with a 1 year lead not interested. And even then they have to be priced at 60 or less a month.
They had to do something otherwise they are just going to bleed customers who need upstream bandwidth.
Business customers do generally require more upload capacity.
Even so VM are not really an option where an alt net is around as they are generally 1:1 or not far off. Everyone on our street is moving from VM or OR to Community Fibre. OR have put the fibre in but you cannot order it whereas the CF system is live.
Netomonia are building where I am bit my house isn’t meant to be covered but I have seen them laying the fibre in the street so hey never know but all they tell me is there in design stage and I have to wonder if you are designing why are you building and laying cables
Still doesn’t compare to the 900/900 of an altnet.
Altnet coverage doesn’t compare to the 55% coverage of the population VM have.
This is about as high as they can go right now and is to be saluted. Progression to 200 up in much of the network in time.
Yeah it’s not as high as they can go. it’s as high as they want to go. They can technically do more, they just don’t want to.
I don’t understand all this complaining about asymmetrical speeds, due to “rip-off Britain”.
Who needs it?
A quick look at my BT Hub shows me this usage since it rebooted 10 days ago.
Data usage:
29.5 GB Uploaded / 502.1 GB Downloaded
This is on FTTP 900. The household has NEVER been constrained by the 110Mbps upload.
I imagine this split is fairly typical, so outside niche use cases, where is the demand?
The article is about business connections not residential.
Businesses often create as much content as they consume, so upload speed is more of an issue.
Residential generally hammer the download through streaming, but do far less uploading.
Sweeping generalisation there considering most OS attempt to sync your content to cloud storage these days with multiple people using devices in a house for example.
PaulLL,
Good for you, but just because you don’t have a need, please don’t assume everyone else doesn’t. There are multiple reasons for bugger upstream, especially for households with more than one persons seeing as most OS is syncing content to the cloud and there are a variety of other things too. Perhaps those people who only use 10GB internet download per month might say to introduce cheaper limited packages into the market again. That wouldn’t work for you would it, you’d be wanting more?!!!!
An symmetric provider will win every time over asymmetric BT and they’re nearly always cheaper.
This might be coming to residential VM incredibly soon, my router just lost connection for a few mins and when it came back the DOCSIS 3.1 Upstream channel had changed to QAM128 from QAM8
Mine has also changed from Qam8 to Qam128. Gig1, HUB4. Has anyone started seeing their uploads increased on these packages?
So dose this mean that people on home networks get nothing no upgrade to 100 mbps I would love to be able to upload things faster as I host games and like to stream etc and more upload dosent Hurt and thay should of been this fast in the 1st place 50 mbps is not grate is it
Coz I think 50 60 mbps for upload on a G connect is bad
Can someone tell me if you seen anything about higher uploads for home customers or is this going to be another one of thows same as trying to get the hub 5 only to be told I can’t they been out ages and we have never ever had equipment to test in beta stage with them and still can’t get a hub 5 1year 1 1/2 years later what a joke I only want it from a modem as it has the higher wan port speed as my router has that 2 so might eek a little more out of profromance