Virgin to launch 100Mbit product in 2010

[broadbandking]

Originally Posted by telfordcable

100Mbps is going to be a new cable modem again (maybe other charge at £100 for the modem) and activation fee with installation charge could be addition too.

Until we know the price why complain, o how I have missed your post telford.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by telfordcable

100Mbps is going to be a new cable modem again (maybe other charge at £100 for the modem) and activation fee with installation charge could be addition too.

Given they have been testing 200Mbit with the same modem they have giving out to 50Mbit customers no it isn't, by default anyway. There may be a new modem but certainly not required.

[zantarous]

I think it would be worth getting just so when you are down the pub talking bout your BB speeds and everyone else is on 8-10MB you can casually say I have a 100MB

Hopefully a regigging of he prices will occur and I know they ahve to replace the modems for 20->50 but for a one of payment it would be nice to have that included in the VIP.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by zantarous

I think it would be worth getting just so when you are down the pub talking bout your BB speeds and everyone else is on 8-10MB you can casually say I have a 100MB

Hopefully a regigging of he prices will occur and I know they ahve to replace the modems for 20->50 but for a one of payment it would be nice to have that included in the VIP.

I guess if you talk about how fast your internet connection is down the pub maybe, though I'm the weirdo who has dropped 50M for 16

I don't see why a rejigging of prices would be necessary, when you bundle the prices as they are vary between just fine and pretty cheap. If people don't want to pay the hopefully considerably higher price for the 100 they don't have to.

[zantarous]

Then they become uncompetitive. There is no point in pricing products beyond what people are prepared to pay, didn't they say at the investors meeting that they had about 50 000 customers for their 50MB? Also as a VIP customer I pay £86 plus £10 for the Asian collection, it is really hard at that stage to justify another £8 for a BB upgrade.

[Tony.]

What we really NEED is for BT/Sky/Orange etc to start pushing the Faster upload speeds they seem to be acheiving. Then perhaps the PR Gurus @ Virgin will start looking at our upload speed

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by zantarous

Then they become uncompetitive. There is no point in pricing products beyond what people are prepared to pay, didn't they say at the investors meeting that they had about 50 000 customers for their 50MB? Also as a VIP customer I pay £86 plus £10 for the Asian collection, it is really hard at that stage to justify another £8 for a BB upgrade.

I pay Sky 58.50/month.
I pay BT 17GBP/month.
I pay Virgin 39GBP/month.

With the exception of the reliability issues on Virgin I get what I pay for and am content. Virgin is being supplanted with an O2 premium 15GBP/month service.

There is nothing uncompetitive about the pricing it's just people in the UK seem to be under the illusion that broadband services should be super cheap due to Sky and O2 subsidising some of their services heavily, then complain when the quality isn't where they would wish it to be.

Prices aren't going to be going down in the market as a whole so the existing VM deals are likely to remain competitive with 100Mbit as a higher priced premium product.

The alternative is that it's rolled out on the cheap with a 3Mbit upstream - no thanks. I would have been happy with a big upstream increase on the 50M and the price staying the same.

I hope it's expensive and that no corners are cut as they were with 50. The pricing on the other products is fine.

---------- Post added at 12:31 ---------- Previous post was at 12:30 ----------

Originally Posted by Tony.

What we really NEED is for BT/Sky/Orange etc to start pushing the Faster upload speeds they seem to be acheiving. Then perhaps the PR Gurus @ Virgin will start looking at our upload speed

They have somewhat though not nearly hard enough and the Virgin PR gurus are looking at it, that's why it's been in 'trials' for 6 months it's being looked at. Sadly not nearly enough is being done.

[zantarous]

So people haven't flocked to the 50MB and your suggesting a even faster service with an even high price point that even less people will flock to?

Virgin have been good in the past with getting rid of 2 and 4MB services. No reason why they shouldn't continue to do this, especially if they made 20MB the entry level connection, they could crush the competition. Especially with BT adding fibre to areas where Virgin probably operate.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by zantarous

So people haven't flocked to the 50MB and your suggesting a even faster service with an even high price point that even less people will flock to?

Virgin have been good in the past with getting rid of 2 and 4MB services. No reason why they shouldn't continue to do this, especially if they made 20MB the entry level connection, they could crush the competition. Especially with BT adding fibre to areas where Virgin probably operate.

They don't care that people haven't flocked to it, it is mostly a marketing thing to say they are faster.

20Mbit won't be the entry level connection for a while, 2 was only upgraded to 10 last year and that was as a belated response to ADSL services going to a default speed of 'up to' 8Mbit. 10Mbit remains faster than the average UK connection so zero incentive to phase it out.

BT adding fibre to about 30% of the areas Virgin operate by 2012 is only really going to affect the top end, ISPs aren't going to do an en masse migration of all their users to 40Mbit for the same price as they pay now for an average of 6 - 8Mbit.

Or they could of course just offer overcontended and under-engineered networks for as low a price point as possible. Forget quality let's save a few quid, can always have a good moan when the corners cut to bring that price point come home to roost like they have with the 50Mbit overlay network and its' upstream congestion.

Virgin would quite like to make some money as well as 'crush' the competition. Upgrading 20 to 50 leaves margins a bit sharp, not least because it would require the replacement of over half a million cable modems.

VM reported a very good quarter for broadband additions. Evidently not so uncompetitive.

[zantarous]

There is no point in having a headline figure if no one is on it, that can be just as an embarrassing headline.

They need people to pay for services not just create headlines.

[Ignitionnet]

The 10Mbit 5GB/month email and a bit of browsing people make the money, not the 20 and 50Mbit 200GB/month customers.

[greyfox1974]

Originally Posted by BenMcr

From the press release it looks likely it's a new tier - XXXL?

hope it aint gonna be x rated lol

[ileikcaek]

100Mb should be called BB100 and 200Mb when released should be BB200

They should quit with all the X's it does get confusing!

10Mb could be Scrapped IMO (at least to new customers after 100Mb is out)... VM will have too many tiers when 200Mb comes out in a few years. 20Mb could then be BB20 and 50Mb BB50

There comes a point when VM will have far too many packages and it becomes really confusing for the less tech savvy.

They could also stop selling the Docsis 1/1.1 packages to new customers after a certain date (mid 2014 maybe) to gradually move new customers onto the Docsis 3 network. It would then be up to customers on the older modems/network to upgrade within, say 8 years before Docsis 1/1.1 could then be deprecated from the network.

Probably sounds stupid.

[ThunderPants73]

Shouldn't they put some effort into making the current services run well first? I myself am happy with my little old 10mb service and I've never had a problem with it but every time I visit these forums it is filled with unhappy customers putting up with dire services.

[zantarous]

That is probably because those that are happy generally don't start thread saying that they are fed up with how well their service runs.I have had a 20MB service from VM for about 14 months and except for to small 40 minutes outages in the middle of the night never really had any issue.