My ISP wrote to me today to say they're increasing the cost of broadband and phone line by £2.51 a month.

Usually this would be bad news but in the UK it always serves as a reminder for me that it's time to knock down the price and haggle the broadband speed up.

What was going to be £59.99/month for 200MB broadband with phone line will now be 300MB with phone line for £45/month fixed at that price for 18 months with no contract

The conversation was funny when the rep tried to explain my upcoming monthly bill, due to the new monthly charge it needed to be adjusted...

Rep: ...so next month your bill will be 44GB and 21 pence... oh!... sorry... I mean... £44 and 21MB
Me: (laughter) You mean £44 pounds and 21 pence?
Rep: (more laughter) Yes, so sorry, 44GB and... oh for goodness sake I give up (laughter), you know what I mean...
Me: Yes, I know, £44.21

Well I thought it was funny, but this is cool... they should advertise just under instead of up to lol

Wow! that's some speed, mind you I knew Virgin had good speeds as they're full fibre, we'd never get them here though. I have the up to 76Mbps here and usually get in the middle 60Mbps via Wi-Fi on this notebook.

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Joan Archer
http://crossstitcher.webs.com

It is quite impressive but it isn't fibre to the premises Joan, it's fibre to the cabinet where I live.. between the cabinet and my cable modem is coax cable, I'm sure others here will be able to go into greater detail about what the means and how it works... suffice to say all I know is Virgin have recently upgraded much of their network to DOCSIS 3.0 (SuperHub 3 Cable Modem also required) that allows them (allegedly) to offer these speeds to residential customers.

I'm lucky in that I live in an area of the capital of Scotland that has a low (50%) contention ratio and always has so I don't have to worry about the network slowing down during peak periods... United Artists, the original layers of fibre in my area clearly did a LOT of forward planning!

What really frustrates me though is the fact there's a 1GB fibre to the premises cable network not 10 yards from my front door but the company that has the contract to supply the network is partially funded by the Scottish Government and Edinburgh City Council and refuses to connect residential premises unless they get enough interest... it's focusing on business and schools etc... when they laid their fibre optic cables residential premises got an A3 leaflet through the door that nearly everyone dismissed as junk mail... trying to convince my neighbours that they could have infinitely better service for half the price is like banging your head against Jay's cooling fan!! LOL

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Mine isn't fully fibre either, it's fibre to the cabinet that is on the outskirts of the village at the opposite end to me and then comes over the original coppers wires that are overhead into my house. The cabinet is connected to a sub station that is perhaps a couple of miles away and that is connected to the main station which is in Tenby about 5/6 miles away.

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Joan Archer
http://crossstitcher.webs.com

Well this is strange, but not unwelcome

It appears my ISP, Virgin Media, has 'secretly' been rolling out a speed upgrade for some of their top tier residential customers, namely a 350MB connection called "Vivid 350"... the new contract I digitally signed only two days ago specified 300MB (Vivid 300) yet when I log into my account on Virgin Media and view "My Package" it clearly states "Vivid 350" (see pic ~ cancel that, pic wouldn't upload lol).

How you currently qualify for this is a bit a mystery as the company doesn't officially acknowledge its existence, e.g. it's not on their website... reading between the lines of the various Virgin Media Forum threads, and threads on other UK Forums, the consensus of opinion appears to be that you need to speak to "retentions" [i.e. Phone up to cancel] and be in an area with a low contention ratio, even then there's no guarantee they'll know what you're talking about as most of the reps haven't been told Vivid 350 exists yet.

My earlier Speedtest.net result is suddenly making a lot more sense and I guess I got lucky

You are definitely lucky, round here we were lucky when it came to getting broadband in the first place. When it first started to be rolled out in place of the old dial up they wanted certain numbers of people showing an interest before they'd install it. It depended on the size of the area how many needed to show interest and as round here doesn't have that many people we thought it would be years before we got it.

Thank goodness for the MOD, the next village where the sub station is, is also home to the MOD radar station and is where they test rockets and drones, it's just a couple of miles by road from here or a 20 minute walk if you go by the back roads.
Because of them we got broadband, wow we could get speeds of about 2Mpbs and no screeching.

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Joan Archer
http://crossstitcher.webs.com