Originally Posted by Kushan (Post 35704019)

Without having the actual statistics of customer tiers, it's hard to argue what percentage is what. However, as far as I understood it, the only people below 30Mbit these days should be those on S and those on DOCSIS2 equipment. There might be the odd person who downgraded from 50/100 and somehow didn't get bumped up to 30Mbit but I can't imagine there'd be many of those. Anyone on M or L with a D3 device should be 30Mbit or higher.

However, that does bring an interesting point - excluding those on S, for now, if someone is on 20Mbit and has a hub, then why haven't they upgraded to 30/50? It should be a "free" upgrade at that point.

As for those on S, I have no idea what percentage of people are on that. It is a retentions package, after all. Even if we are liberal with the figures and say that just 10% of those on less than 30 haven't got D3 equipment, that's still going to be hundreds of thousands of people. I'd still class that as "loads" which was the original point.

Originally Posted by Kushan (Post 35703601)

No, with the speed doubling, loads of people were left on DOCSIS2 equipment because Virgin didn't offer a FREE upgrade to 30Mbit, you had to pay I think a one-off fee of £30 or something to get a Superhub.

Anyone on 10 (M/L) only went to 20 unless they got new equipment - which because it was a fee, I think loads didn't bother with. That meant loads of people left on M/L 20Mbit when they could get 30Mbit if they had a SH.

The M/L tier is by far where the majority of customers are so it wouldn't be a surprise that a greater number of customers need an equipment upgrade this time around than last.

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq (Post 35704033)

Hundreds of thousands, taken in context, means less than a quarter in this case - which is what I stated. Which again, in context, is not "loads" IMO.

Would you call 100,000 grains of salt "loads"? (that's about 6KG by the way). Perhaps loads if you were looking at how much you ate in a meal. But a person loading up a supermarket shelf from a 500KG pallet would not call a single 6KG bag "loads". And that's what we're looking at here. Dealing with low double-digit percentages, or a hundreds of thousands out of of over 4 million. Their 2013 figures showed "hundreds of thousands" of customers joining or upgrading to 30Mb+ requiring DOCSIS 3 equipment each quarter - 209,000 in Q4 alone. Over the year, 90% of those moving to 30Mb+ were existing upgrades rather than new customers (900,000 in total) so clearly they have the supply chain and infrastructure and funding in place to allow such scale of upgrades and equipment replacements.

Originally Posted by heero_yuy (Post 35704034)

I'm one and they have said the free upgrade to 50M is coming but as usual they're a bit vague as to when it will actually happen. Not that I'm that fussed because the 20M is pretty solid and I don't do a lot of big downloads.

I could probably blag an early upgrade if I really wanted it.

Originally Posted by jb66 (Post 35704035)

M has never ever been 30meg

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I've never seen an M 30, L 30 was more expensive than M20

Originally Posted by Kushan (Post 35704060)

I think the sum total of this is that "loads" is a relative term. I'd say 10% of customers is "loads" as that's quite a significant chunk (And again, I'd say 10% is being incredibly conservative). If Virgin lost 10% of their customers one quarter and someone said "Virgin just lost loads of customers", you wouldn't say they were wrong. Even if it is just 100,000 people, that's still a hell of a lot to upgrade in one chunk. New equipment for every one of them? For what gain, other than extra load on the network? I'm sure it'll happen eventually.

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq (Post 35704816)

Yeah, many monitors have HDMI inputs and the like these days.