Virgin planes for 150mb connection speeds

Maccy · 24 Mar 2009 at 16:55

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7961135.stm

Will it be true??

FrenchTart · 24 Mar 2009 at 17:18

"Much faster upstream speeds"

Lol...How could they possibly manage to go faster than their 1.5mbit upstream on the 50mbit product?

/sarcasm

Tomsk · 24 Mar 2009 at 17:21

I read that as Virgin Areoplanes are going to have 150Mbits.

Paddy4929 · 24 Mar 2009 at 17:24

150mbits is all well and good, but at the end of the day all I'm after is a stable connection with the lowest possible ping to the game server. Not a big downloader.

Maccy · 24 Mar 2009 at 17:26

I don't see how most households will benefit from this. There's only so fast that we need? I'm on 16mb at home, 10mb at uni, and these are both fast enough!

Dist · 24 Mar 2009 at 17:42

The problem with speeds that high is that to my knowledge the WAN port on most home routers is 100Mb. Then again I havn't looked into home routers for many months now, so perhaps the WAN port can support up to 1000Mb speeds. Either way, it will mean people would need a relativly new router to support >100Mb/s

FrenchTart · 24 Mar 2009 at 18:18

Dist said:
The problem with speeds that high is that to my knowledge the WAN port on most home routers is 100Mb. Then again I havn't looked into home routers for many months now, so perhaps the WAN port can support up to 1000Mb speeds. Either way, it will mean people would need a relativly new router to support >100Mb/s

Or it'll mean that several people in the family could go on the internet at the same time with less danger of slow downs.

lopkinfop · 24 Mar 2009 at 20:27

i think their plans are HDTV over IP etc, also you cant imagine a use for those speeds now but in 3-4 years there will be other things, maybe iplayer HD etc. then theres always the next generation - super HDTV

one thing i would like would be the ability to watch different things in different rooms on demand, that would take a very large bandwidth

Burnsy2023 · 24 Mar 2009 at 20:33

Maccy said:
I don't see how most households will benefit from this. There's only so fast that we need? I'm on 16mb at home, 10mb at uni, and these are both fast enough!

You caould say that about processing power and storage space. We always manage to create new things that require higher specs.

milkinc13 · 24 Mar 2009 at 21:26

150Mb/s. i wouldn't mind getting 20Mb/s, but think i'm ot far away from exchange to get that. bring on the FTTC BT

Phemo · 24 Mar 2009 at 23:04

Aekeron said:
Or it'll mean that several people in the family could go on the internet at the same time with less danger of slow downs.

But if you have a 150mbit connection with a router that provides 100mbit of throughput, then you're never going to see more than 100mbit of bandwidth, regardless of how many users there are using the connection at the same time. That router would be a big bottleneck.

However I'm sure this won't be an issue. Even now with 50mbit there are quite a lot of older routers that can't support that level of throughput which is why Virgin are giving out a free router that can support it. Mainly it's so they don't get blamed for providing a poor connection when in fact most people's kit would be the issue. As a result, by the time they do offer better speeds, it's safe to say they'll carry on providing a router that is up to the job.

FrenchTart · 24 Mar 2009 at 23:51

Phemo said:
But if you have a 150mbit connection with a router that provides 100mbit of throughput, then you're never going to see more than 100mbit of bandwidth, regardless of how many users there are using the connection at the same time. That router would be a big bottleneck.

However I'm sure this won't be an issue. Even now with 50mbit there are quite a lot of older routers that can't support that level of throughput which is why Virgin are giving out a free router that can support it. Mainly it's so they don't get blamed for providing a poor connection when in fact most people's kit would be the issue. As a result, by the time they do offer better speeds, it's safe to say they'll carry on providing a router that is up to the job.

Ah yeah. I forgot about the WAN side needing a higher speed

Not to mention switching fabric, as you say.

hedgey · 25 Mar 2009 at 06:09

gigabit routers are old news. uk hasnt needed them is all.

lopkinfop · 25 Mar 2009 at 06:15

hedgey said:
gigabit routers are old news. uk hasnt needed them is all.

Exactly, the reason 100mb WAN ports have been used until now and will be used for a while yet is cost, gigabit ports haven`t been needed and there was no sign of them being needed so why waste the money.

as soon as more than 100mb connections are available there will be plenty of routers available, and VM usually give free routers to those who sign up

mrk · 25 Mar 2009 at 08:36

Good free routers at that too...

CK61938 · 25 Mar 2009 at 12:02

I have 50Mb and my upload is 1.5Mb which helps for my FTP server. I do a lot of downloads as well. So I would welcome the upgrade to 100Mb or 150Mb...the faster the better I say

FrenchTart · 25 Mar 2009 at 12:23

CK61938 said:
I have 50Mb and my upload is 1.5Mb which helps for my FTP server. I do a lot of downloads as well. So I would welcome the upgrade to 100Mb or 150Mb...the faster the better I say

When you can get 2.5mbit plus on "lowly" 24mbit downstream products, the 1.5mbit upload introduced with the VM 50mbit package is a huge, huge joke :/

jrwagh333 · 25 Mar 2009 at 12:28

my 50mb is downloading at 10mb! go me!... getting an engineer out to day to sort this awful mess out!!

Nick1881 · 25 Mar 2009 at 14:32

Aekeron said:
When you can get 2.5mbit plus on "lowly" 24mbit downstream products, the 1.5mbit upload introduced with the VM 50mbit package is a huge, huge joke :/

Agreed, Virgin should have done 50mb down and 5mb up at least, i'd have signed up then.

JimAroo · 25 Mar 2009 at 14:43

Some rumours flying about that VM will offer 5mb upstream speeds for their 50mb package. Once they sort out upstream channel bonding.

Wouldn't bet on it though.