120M : Virgin Media 150Mb Coming 2014

[jb66]

Originally Posted by Kushan

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.

M has never ever been 30meg

---------- Post added at 13:53 ---------- Previous post was at 13:52 ----------

Originally Posted by Kushan

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.

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

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

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.

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.

Another thought - what modem is in the TiVo?

Originally Posted by heero_yuy

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

M has never ever been 30meg

---------- Post added at 13:53 ---------- Previous post was at 13:52 ----------



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

Aha, so it would seem! I've gotten confused because M and L have been interchangeable in the past, in terms of speed. There has been a 10Mbit M, a 10MbitL, a 20Mbit M, a 20Mbit L and today there appears to be a 50Mbit M and a 50MBit L. Seems 30 was the only one that never made the jump.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Kushan

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.

Well if you were talking about losing all those customers in one go, then yes it'd probably be loads, the same goes for gain. But we're comparing to previous upgrades and existing organic tariff increments, where last year saw a 50% increase of 30Mb+ customers, upgrading them doesn't really equate to losing customers.

As for what gain... well that question would be applied better to any of their "free" speed upgrades at any level.

[horseman]

One could of course just look at VM Business results perhaps?

Heres the salient part of 1Q2014 results:

Our internet subscribers increased organically by 34,800 in the quarter. Now 3.4 million, or 77%, of our 4.4 million internet customers take superfast broadband services of 30 Mbps or faster, an increase of 189,700. A third take speeds of 60 Mbps or above, up from 27% a year ago. Peak internet use across our network is now more than 60% higher than a year ago as customers do more online and connect more devices. A representative sample of our superfast broadband customers indicates approximately twice as many households are connecting five or more devices to their home broadband than a year ago. In April, Ofcom published its latest Broadband Speeds Report, confirming our customers receive the fastest broadband throughout the day including at peak times. This is the ninth report by the industry regulator since May 2009, and Virgin Media has been the fastest provider in all of them. Our average speeds will become even faster because of our recently launched program to deliver more power to our existing customers. This program began at the end of February, and will boost our top speed to 152 Mbps, which is twice as fast as our major competitors. As part of this program, for no additional charge, our 30 Mbps customers will be able to boost to 50 Mbps, 60 Mbps customers will be able to boost to 100 Mbps, and 120 Mbps customers will be able to boost to 152 Mbps.

[eto]

hmm .. im currently on a superhub @ 60

just had a call from Virginmedia offering a superhub 2 + tivo + 100mb for 25p more a month

but they would want to send a engineer

cant i just swap out the superhub myself?

and i dont have a tv ..

[General Maximus]

i think the engineer is going to be for setting up the tivo which is going to be funny considering you dont have one.

[eto]

the guy on the phone seemed to reckon i could use the tivo with my computer

i seriously dont imagine yer normal virginguy will be able to deal with 64-bit Linux

whatever, i could get the deal and not use the tivo .. its a speed-double for 25p extra a month

or is there a catch?

its also gonna cost them less to send or just drop round the gear, which is what happened when i went to superhub1

the next problem is finding this guy again, or what bit of Virginmedia to call?

[Kushan]

You'll need all of the varous extra splitters and cabling for the TiVo - and a Virgin engineer needs to be the one to install it as they don't trust people to do it correctly and risk dumping noise onto the network.

For using it with your computer, I can only presume he meant via an input card or just the monitor itself. In any case, Virgin techs will not touch your PC or at least they're not really supposed to.

[qasdfdsaq]

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

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

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

Many but not all - there are still plenty of new monitors today that don't. Even if they do, they don't usually have speakers either.

[eto]

yeah, well, i'd like to order the SH2 modem + speed-increase for 25p, hold the tivo

[Jayster]

All upgraded here on bele headend.

[General Maximus]

ditto the previous post which has just been deleted (it doesn't help that "head" is mentioned either)

[jb66]

I thought the same. Seems I'm not as immature as I thought

[qasdfdsaq]

Huh?