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UPDATE Virgin Media Boosts Top Cable Broadband Speeds to 200Mbps

Tuesday, Sep 29th, 2015 (7:30 am) - Score 36,257

As expected Virgin Media (Liberty Global), the national urban-focused UK cable operator, has today launched another “free” increase to their subscribers broadband speeds up to a maximum of 200Mbps (Megabits per second), but it’s not as much as had been expected and uploads remain unchanged.

The announcement won’t come as much of a surprise to our readers because Virgin Media has a long history of delivering “double speed” boosts every 18-24 months or so and recently a number of 300Mbps trials had been spotted (here), which was followed by confirmation that they planned to do another upgrade (here) and today we know the outcome.

But what will come as a surprise is the fact that this time around the increase isn’t a “double” boost at all and it may be perceived as a little underwhelming by those who had been expecting more. On top of that Virgin will also rebrand their top “ultrafast” broadband packages once again and bring them under the “VIVID” banner.

As with prior boosts the latest increases will be delivered by using Virgin’s existing DOCSIS 3.0 / EuroDOCSIS cable platform and the upgrade itself is due to be deployed as part of a phased approach over the next few months, with 90% of the roll-out being completed by the end of 2015 and 100% by June 2016 (note: it begins on 1st October 2015).

Existing customers will be given the OPTION to upgrade from their current package for “free” (we’re told that users won’t need to re-contract for this). Just remember that Virgin Media’s prices, much like those of other ISPs, have recently been rising and we expect more of the same going forwards (this helps to pay for such improvements).

Virgin Media’s New Broadband Speed Tiers

Old Speed: 50Mbps [3Mbps Upload]
New Speed: 70Mbps [5Mbps Upload]

Old Speed: 100Mbps [6Mbps Upload]
New Speed: 150Mbps [10Mbps Upload]

Old Speed: 152Mbps [12Mbps Upload]
New Speed: 200Mbps [12Mbps Upload]

The move compliments the operator’s £3bnProject Lighting” network expansion, which will bring their predominantly urban services to 17 million premises (60%+ coverage of the UK) by 2020 (here) and that’s up from around 45% today.

In relation to this the first trials of future DOCSIS 3.1 technology are also expected to follow in the near future (the latest info. we’ve been given is “sometime in 2016“), which means that within another 18 months we might see another boost. Comcast in the USA is performing a similar upgrade between 2016 and 2018, which will deliver speeds of up to 1Gbps (1000Mbps).

Going forwards Virgin will also need to be mindful of BT’s plan to roll-out 300-500Mbps G.fast broadband to 10 million homes over the next 5-10 years (here, here and here), but the advantage Virgin has is that they can deploy to a larger number of premises and in a significantly shorter period of time (months instead of years).

Gregor McNeil, Managing Director of Consumer at Virgin Media said:

Our message is simple: if you want to be certain that you are signing up to true ultrafast broadband speeds of 100Mbps and above, Vivid from Virgin Media is the new standard.

The speed of a customer’s broadband connection matters; when you have more you can do more.”

Mind you it’s worth remembering that not all of Virgin Media’s customers are able to get even yesterday’s top advertised speeds (a few areas still appear to be oversubscribed) and those that do can sometimes still experience the dreaded “buffering” effect on video streams, which can be caused by all sorts of other complicated network issues (it’s not always related to headline service speeds).

Never the less most of the operator’s customers do appear to get a decent speed and their performance is always ranked well above the other major national providers (most of those are stuck with slower FTTC), while past upgrades have broadly shown that the ISP can deliver the capacity that’s needed to cope with such upgrades.

On the other hand most consumers probably won’t fully utilise even the speeds offered by the operators new entry-level package (70Mbps), let alone 200Mbps, and we wonder if Virgin aren’t also missing a trick by not offering a truly low-cost option to compete with the likes of Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and PlusNet. But then they’ve always prided themselves on being a “premium” service.

At this point it might be worth saying that Virgin Media often follows such boosts by launching a new cable router, which means that a future SuperHub v3 could be just around the corner and we’ve already been given the first hint (here). In the meantime their existing SuperHub 2AC router can still cope.

UPDATE 12:44pm

Good news folks, after initially being told by Virgin Media’s PR team that there would be NO upload speed changes, we’ve now been informed by them that in fact there will be a couple of small increases (see the corrected values above). However it only seems to apply on the 70Mbps and 150Mbps packages, with the new 200Mbps tier remaining on uploads of 12Mbps.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 .
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