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Living in the UK? Interested in getting access to the world’s fastest broadband connection? Virgin have been trialling their amazingly fast speeds in the UK — A full 100 Mbps faster than the ‘standard’ for super high speed access.
Want to join in? Well, unfortunately the service is only available to some incredibly lucky users in the town of Ashford, Kent. Ashford is well known as being one of Virgin Media’s favourite testing grounds for new services and otherwise ‘unseen’ speeds. The service even beats the speed of Japanese cable which can reach speeds of up to 160 Mbps. Considering that access to 50 Mbps speeds are quite rare and many people in the UK can’t reach speeds beyond 8 Mbps, it’s quite an impressive service all around. Or at least it would be, if any of us could ever use it.
Virgin isn’t just showing off, though. They’ve said they are using the trail to test just how commercially viable a service running at such a high speed would be. The tests will also allow the company to see how people will take advantage of such a high speed in the future. Piracy seems like it would be quite high on the list, but other services that are only at infancy now could benefit from the technology. The largest use could once again come from streaming applications; this time streaming HD and 3D TV entertainment to home users.
The service could also provide valuable information about where bottlenecking is occurring. When the speed from the consumer’s home becomes so fast, it’s the actual speed of the internet as a whole that could slow down the service rather than the ISP itself. This is something that has yet to be a problem in the UK but it has affected providers in other countries offering super high speed lines. There’s no point having a 200 Mbps line if the site you are streaming from can only send you the data at 80 Mbps, for example.
Having said that, it’s clear the move was also made to let the country know just how fast things ‘could’ be and show off their network capacity against ADSL. The ADSL service — which uses copper cables rather than high speed fibre optic lines — is totally outclassed in terms of speed.
Talking to Silicon.com, Ian Fogg, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research said: “Virgin Media is clearly positioning around the speed of its broadband service and they’re looking to make hay while the speeds of their rivals using DSL are limited by the copper telephone line… Virgin Media are shaking up the UK broadband market. They’re looking to increase dissatisfaction with speed.”
So 200 Mbps might not be around the corner for most of us but it does exist, at least. Hopefully this move by Virgin Media will prepare the company and others for a future where currently accepted speeds of 8 Mbps are a distant memory. Until then, there’s always ADSL2+ offering 24 Mbps to some customers and Virgins own 50 Mbps service.
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