Will Virgin Medias super-fast broadband service stay fast?

The recent launch of Virgin Media highly acclaimed 50Mbps broadband has met with criticism that the incredible speed it is offering are unlikely to last very long.

The promises made by this new service, which is currently the fastest mainstream broadband service in the country and can cost as much as £51 per month, is that it will take three minutes instead of the current six minutes to download a feature-length film and from 25 seconds to 11 seconds to download a music album.

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The problem that critics see is that as more subscribers “share” this super-fast network when the number of customers signing up for the new Virgin service increase the connection speeds will inevitably drop.

Plans are set in the middle of next year for Virgin to place download restrictions on its broadband services and these will be focused on peer-to-peer downloading services, which allow for films to be downloaded illegally, and the customers who use them.

An “acceptable usage limit” is already in place on its 20Mbps service which throttles the speed of connection to 5Mbps for five hours if more than 3GB (or 3 movies) worth of data is downloaded during the peak hours of 4PM and 9PM.

The previous high speed 20Mbps service provided by Virgin and costs £36 per month was recently found to be giving its customers only half the speed of connection it had advertised, according to research by analysts Think Broadband.

“The problem with the current advertising of broadband is that consumers can distinguish between providers using cost and top speeds, but they cannot say which provider offers the best quality or is most likely to give them the speeds they want,” said Forrester Research analyst, Ian Fogg.

A number of factors can affect the actual speeds of broadband including proximity to a local broadband exchange, the type of broadband (Copper wire with Sky and BT or Fibre optic with Virgin), the configuration of the home broadband itself and how many people are using the same connection simultaneously.

The current issue is that many providers show the top speeds in theory when advertising their broadband services. A complaint made recent that Tiscali users were not getting an “up to 8Mbps” speed was recently upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority who said that the small print that read “Top speeds may vary significantly” needed to be more prominent.