Virgin Media shows off stylish 50Mbps cable modem
By Darren Murph 
posted Nov 8th 2008 6:40PM
posted Nov 8th 2008 6:40PM
[Via TrustedReviews]
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If there was a modem with speeds of 1337kbps, id buy it in an instant
That's pretty damn slow...
So what? its fucking l33t
You should have made it 1337mbps
1337kbps is NOT l33t.
Using l33t is NOT l33t.
50Mbps is.
I think you just failed at units. If it were 1337 gigabits/sec, I'd call it leet. Kilobits just implies you're another moronic script kiddie fucktard.
I love the internets!
@iEye
You'll love it even more when this tech gets to Comcast. What is the cap again? 200Gb? You'll speed up and be cut off in NO time =P
Interesting... in Spain they're starting to roll out 50 and 100 Mbps through EuroDOCSIS 3.0 (Cisco EPC3000 capable of doing +200/120 Mbps) and Virgin Media is giving out an outdated version of DOCSIS 3.0 that has a maximum output of 50 Mbps? How lame is that?
Oh, and no cap.
Even better if they upgraded their boadband speeds. They're falling behind.
What do you think that modem is for?
Falling behind the up to 8Mbps connection that the bt network offers?
Erm, last time I checked, VM were actually the fastest consumer broadband provider in the UK, with their 20Mbit connection. And yes, you actually get the full 20Mbit, unlike certain DSL-based providers who advertise 24Mbps, but give you less than half of that...
Virgin provide both Cable and ADSL broadband, the Cable they provide to the door which is where this 50Mb baby will be used. They also provide ADSL which is BT's copper to the door and Virgin provide the backbone which is much slower than the 20Mb of their current Cable offering.
We subscribe to 10Mbps on Virgin, but never get more than about 6.5.
Guys, I pay £18 per month with Be broadband and get ~22 meg unlimited. Virgin comes nowhere near.
They might offer 50mbps but you'll only get it if the day has a Z in it.
I have Virgin Broadband 20Mbps package (with 768Kb upstream) and it always hits this speed on tests, and I can do plenty of simultaneous downloads to use the full bandwidth, this cable modem service is far superior to any ADSL one in my area.
Peak hours is 5pm to 9pm -- four hours of the day -- and if you download more than 3GB or upload more than 1.4GB during those hours you are throttled to 5Mbps for five hours; I simply do my large downloading during the day or overnight, i.e. outside this four hour window.
I did have a speed problem in the past, and some connection dropping, but their customer service quickly identified the cable modem as the cause (it was old and the high speed kept crashing it) and they couriered me a new one immediately; they were really helpful and solved my problem right away.
As to their fibre-optic advertising, I read that in new housing developments such as some in North Kent, they are installing fibre to the house rather than copper.
And I gets single digit pings in some TF2 servers, and most of the commercial ones are less than 20. PING!
So yep, pretty happy with this service. :)
Wow dude you are leet!
that has to be the SEXIEST modem ive EVER seen
Those are two words I never thought I would see together. lol.
I don’t get it.
I always want my “networking stash” to look as much like commercial gear as possible. If I could afford all top line rack mounted Cisco stuff I’d be using it. In no way would I consider a stylized My Little Pony/Star Wars collection modem cool. In fact, if I were forced to use this box I’d probably hide in back of the stack or somehow try to make it look a little more serious.
Form follows function for us PC guys…
@-----
Sounds to me like form doesn't really follow function in your case; in fact quite the opposite - you seem very interested in what it looks like but don't mention anything about how well it works.
You're sounding like the anti-fashion brigade who insist that they don't care about fashion yet are very careful to never wear anything fashionable. They're just as much fashion victims as the people who only wear what's fashionable.
HAHAHAHAH BITCHES IM FIRST
Oh shit, sorry bout that but my idiot cousin took my pc
lol, I ranked you up for that
I've heard virgin throttle a lot and delivery sub-par speeds and reliability across the board. I'm with Be on their 24mbps package and getting about 14mbps according to speedtest.net with pings of 10< to all the TF2 servers I play regularly on so I'm very happy with it. I no longer feel the pangs of jealously when I read news like this, compared to when I had a really crappy 2mb connection :)
Still, that's a pretty sexy modem.
Virgin media do have some funny throttling but only if you're a crazy heavy bandwidth user. So, you're on their 24mbps package and you're only getting 14mbps? I'm on Virgin's 2mbps package (yes, I know) and I get almost exactly 2mbps speed on speedtest. Other people with faster connections similiarly get exactly what's advertised. Plus, their customer service are just lovely.
That's a damned sexy modem, too!
Click the read link if you haven't, there's a few more pics...then take a scroll down to the comments and read the first two. Nice to see that Techradar is populated with intelligent people!
I was on virgin 4mbps (though apparently we'd been upgraded to 10) up til about a month ago, and it was a load of balls. The internet died at least once a day, and we had a 700MB limit before we got throttled, which is ridiculous seeing as my household consists of 6 people, and on my own i normally download 700 in a day. so we switched to o2 broadband which has been vastly superior, no throttling, and much higher speeds on 8mbps. richard branson's a wanker.
That's funny. I'm on a 6(or 8?)MB/s plan from Comcast, and I get about 400-900KB/s down.
It all depends where you live but I've seen more underperforming"fastest-in-the-uk" virgin than be24. I prefer to have 8mbits on fast, without traffic shaping - it "just works", all the time.
I'd be jumping up and down about this if it wasn't for Virgin Media's stupid fucking download caps.
At least they told you. On this side of the Atlantic it took Comcast ages to own up to their cap.
Only one ethernet port? WTF?
Okay, so this is a /modem/ and not a /router./ You know the difference, yeah?
Its a modem, only one port needed to have it directed to your router of choice
That's embarrassing... I'd make a new profile after that one.
I hope to get this... i currently have Virgin's 20MB package...
Does it suck or does it provide?
To be fair, my speed on average is about 12 mb, this is through an old 54mb wireless connection from the opposit corner of the house, and the connection is almostly constantly shared between 2 computers. If that has any effect...
But i've never had any problems with connectivity, so thats a plus.
Id love to have this epic connection, but sadly BT would prefer me not to.
In my area BT basically said "fuck you" to NTL or whatever provider it was back then, and cable was never installed in our area.
No Virgin Media good times :(
It's so easy these days to make a gadget, "sexy." Just make it black and glossy as hell.
Not really, the 1st gen iPhone is dead sexy, like a muscle car with a 350 V8...
the new black one looks like shite! like a cheap honda civic with a 1 litre girl scout engine...
Throwing on a couple of blue LEDs doesn't hurt either.
Virgin Media are a great ISP.. very fair on the customers, such a shame ive bought a new house recently & ive had to goto O2 Broadband, while there good... due to BT's crappy lines (copper wires!) im over a mile from the exchange, meaning im trapped with 13mb broadband, virgins fiberoptic isnt avaliable in the area, im just hoping they expand alot... id certainly sign up if it appeared in my new area.
Beard.
The thing is that as far as I'm aware of, and the job I do means I do have regular chats to the guys behind the Virgin Media network, they don't do fibre optic to anyones door. They advertise fibre to my door but unless someones recently invented fibre over copper it doesnt exist. The system they use is fibre to a local distribution box and then a shared coaxial feeder from there. Its theoretically capable of a lot but I'm still disputing the advertising they do with the ASA as I still belive its very misleading.
Virgin Media are an aweful ISP. I was on their 20mbit plan, which is great for the first 3GB (doesn't take long) then you get dropped to 5mb for the rest of the peak hours. Absolutely shocking and this rule was changed during contract without notifying me.
I wouldn't ever use a Virgin Media service again, their customer support is outsourced, their tech support is clueless and they are ignorant and rude.
Highly reccommend be24! Solid connection, great speed, no capping.
be24 and O2 are currently the best ISPs available in the UK (O2 uses Be's network).
And they are not even based in the UK... Bulgaria I think, that's why.. they care about service aswell as profit.
I'm pretty sure they changed it but it's still pretty rubbish if you're a medium to heavy user.
Another happy Be* customer here, my friend is on virgin media and he is always going on about how hes always getting throttled by the speed trolls at virgin.
+1 for Be. Only ever used there support team once and the guy in question absolutely knew his stuff. Never had any problems with being capped either; I easily d/l 50Gb+ each month and have never noticed a performance drop.
I have to agree, the Virgin Media customer service is by far the worst customer service I have ever experienced in my life.
I used to have broadband with them but at one stage it got to be a joke, the connection kept dropping and I would have to call out an engineer. This happened 10 times in three months. So, I finally gave up and moved to ADSL. That was several years ago and I am very reluctant to try them again. I've never had a problem with ADSL.
I still have cable tv with them, but that is really only because it very rarely goes wrong. God forbid there is a problem because it involves at least a twenty to forty minute wait to get through to someone. I might add that it is not a freephone number either, unless you have telephone services with them, yet another service from them I got rid of!!
Now if only I could get a reliable 50mbps downstream cable connection, I'd be smitten.
Sure, a 50Mbps modem is great, but not when the infrastructure needed to use this thing to it's full potential is pathetically slow in being created.
DOCSIS 3.0 actually allows upto 160Mbps, so if this modem is compatible it should be able to do that and the 50 is what they decided to offer for now but that's not the specs of the modem.
Incidentally, DOCSIS 3.0 is also designed for IPv6 and this thing has a gigabit port too I hear, so it's more 'now'.
Here's a link with some info from motorola regarding their DOCSIS 3 offerings, but obviously much of that info is to the point for any DOCSIS 3 product:
http://business.motorola.com/ultrabroadbandsolutions/resources.html
Interesting things include the improved support (including security) by DOCSIS 3 of multicasting, that means an ISP could push TV over their broadband network without having to waste tons of bandwidth for instance, and improved management by ISP's using a more expansive XML based system, and IPv6 as I said already.
Why does everyone bash BT? BT are awesome, you people have no insight.
Do you know why BT don't offer 20mbit broadband and only up to 8mbit ADSL? Its because they are pouring all their money into upgrading the UK's infrastructure for gigabit by 2011. They are rest piloting it where i live (in dundee) and other than the annoyance of dug up roads, its going to kick ass. 100mbit here i come :)
BT has a long history of selling broadband which then was 'shared' with the neigbours and at any sort of peak time they basically designed it to be slow, that annoys people, especially if in the rest of the world every person with DSL got his own line, and the backbone had to get congested for things to go slow.
And they can promise gigabit but if you believe you get that at any point 10 years before the entire world already has it... well send in your picture for publication in dictionaries next to the entry 'gullible' please.
BT? BT is just a boulder in the path of faster connections.
I've had Telewest/VirginMedia broadband for 6yrs+ now and have only ever had two outages which were for no more than 24hrs. I have had the fastest connection possible (so I am on 20Mbit currently) and I have always got the advertised speeds. Speedtest.net has always been pretty spot on and when I download the stuff I download I get around 2.34Mb/sec which is exactly what I would expect.
Yes their customer services sux a bit but as I haven't really had to use them much I don't care plus I would guess they are no better or worse than anybody else. Bandwidth shaping/limiting does sux too so I just set everything to download during the night anyway.
As for Be giving you upto 24Mbit downloading speeds, great! Virgin are just about to double it and Be aren't going to be able to get any faster.
Hmm £36/month for wildly varying performance or £18/month for consistent performance.. :].
Hopefully all the other ISPs can offer more than ADSL2+ to break Virgin's monopoly in higher speed links (Virgin doesn't provide the potential of the link).
Everyone's talking about the download speeds of Virgin Media, so what about the potential upload speeds using this modem with virgin media service? Also, does Virgin media have caps for monthly downloads?........reason I ask is due to a setup of a slingbox in the U.K streaming to a slingcatcher in the U.S and the better the future potential upload speeds using a modem like this, the better the picture quality on the other end watching it using the slingcatcher.
I have 120 mbps down / 10 mb up on UPC Eurodocsis 3.0 in the Netherlands. And I actually get this speed as well. They sent somebody to optimize my connection and finalize the installation. € 80 including taxes per month. Price will come down, it has been introduced las month.
I switched to Virgin Media 10Mbps from BT Broadband 8Mbps and I can honestly say I think BT was the better provider. I nearly always got the full 8Mbps and even thought I wasn't on unlimited, when I went over by 10GB every month, I just paid like, 50 per GB extra, which wasn't bad in my eyes.
Yea', this modem is sexy, but, what's the point? Haha, well I know the answer is, "Why not?".
I don't think I'll be switching to this 50Mbps connection anytime soon anyway, I'm quite happy as I'm the only person downloading in my house =]
Don't be alarmed!!!
I meant 50p, not £50.
Just remember that in some other countries you can download/upload 500gb-1000gb+ per month with no extra cost, no slowdowns and no complaints from your ISP.
I'm with Be as well. I pay for 24MB but receive 24.5MB.
I also get that speed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week regardless of how much I download.
Yup, Be* and O2 are the best.. I hope it lasts.. and improves, they are a diamond in the rough of the UK ISP market.
During peak times their 20Mbit service can't cope with the capacity issues. Speeds go down to 2mbit sometimes, and if you reach the download limit, throttling kicks in for 5 hours and you're crippled, any form of digital entertainment you wanted to experience has been ruined by lack of proper capacity from the ISP.
This used to be different. This used to be perfect, when Telewest was the company, when there was no throttling and no capacity issues.
I was going to reply but Comcast says I just reached my bandwidth cap...
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Dont try this on Time Warner in Charlotte, NC USA. You would be LUCKY to get the advertised 8Mbps even if you pay for it.
I have both Virgin Media and O2 (aka Be) Broadband.
On Virgin Media, I'm supposedly on a 10 Megabit connection, and I am with them on Cable (not ADSL). However I have never been able to download a more the 5 Megabits (550 Kilobytes/sec), even when trying at some time like 3 am in the morning. My area must be heavily saturated with other Virgin Cable users (I live in London, England), because between 4pm-Midnight every day I only ever get about 1 Megabit (120 kilobytes/sec) regardless where I download from. Sometimes the speed is throttled so badly at peak times, I am unable to stream BBC iPlayer or 4onDemand. I pay £25 a month for this.
On the other hand I also have O2 Broadband over ADSL2.
I'm on an 8 Megabit connection with them, and because of my distance from the phone exchange, I realistically only connect at about 6 Megabits (700ish kilobytes/sec). However at all times I get this speed regardless, no speed caps, no traffic shaping, no bandwidth limits. I download as much as I want and always get the same speed. BBC iPlayer and 4onDemand stream perfect all the time. I pay £7.50 a month for this.
You can see who the clear winner is here. And I would like you to consider my experience when Virgin claim they intend to deliver 50 Megabits.
Mike
http://www.dslzoneuk.net/isp_ratings.php
O2/Be* on top.. Virgin media on bottom with terrible reviews and ratings :].
Im not sure i want a representative of the music industry to make my modem...