Photography, geek, gadget stuff and life.
Posts tagged broadband
Virgin Broadband at 50mb/s XXL
0At last, the guys from Virgin arrived today to install my “Big Boy Broadband” as someone chose to call it. Darren and Paul; they came and went within an hour but not after alot of banter! Mind you, I wouldn’t blame them!
There was a small hitch after they had gone; they left me to do the activation via a website. The modem was supposed to reboot after the activation but it didn’t. I manually rebooted the modem by unplugging it from the mains. After the restart things still weren’t up and running. However, I gave it sometime to settle. The LAN IP ranges were 192.168.0.1, whilst I had been using 192.168.1.1 so I went around making sure all my devices picked up the new LAN range.
I came back to retest the modem and things were looking good. I did an immediate speed test, I only got okay results:
i put it down to the time; it was 4.27pm, nearing the time when national ‘net traffic is quite high. I left it for a bit then did another test and BINGO!
I’m very pleased so far. I know I won’t get consistantly 50mb/s but I don’t care, it’s the upload I need. Being a photographer I upload alot of media online or send alot of data to clients.
I will let you know in a month or so how I get on with Virgin XXL Broadband.
100mb Virgin Broadband release schedule
0Just a quick post. I’m in the process (still) of deciding which new broadband to get; in the UK there are only two choices, BT Infinity or Virgin Broadband.
Virgin are rolling out 100mb down and (more interestingly) 10mb up speeds as we speak. During my research I found this very useful PDF from Virgin about their UK 100mb rollout schedule. I hope you find it useful.
http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf/100Mb-rollout-7-12-10.pdf
Fibre Broadband. Why BT Infinity is the better option
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Right now in the UK, the competition to get Fibre Broadband into our homes has just begun. For a quite a while now Virgin has had the monopoly in providing very fast broadband but that has all changed as of October 2010. BT has been trialling their version of Fibre for some months and has finally become available to the general public; BT call it Infinity.
On paper BT Infinity looks like the better option; up to 40mb download and (more interestingly) up to 10mb upload. As a professional photographer who needs to upload a lot of media online having an option to upload photographs to my own websites as well as to clients is a delicious treat. Also I have been shooting High Definition video; on my bog standard ADSL line it can take hours to upload a full HD video to YouTube or for clients to preview. With a 10mb upload that does not seem as daunting.
Virgin Media Broadband has similar qualities to Infinity in terms of downloads. In fact, data suggests the download is slightly more reliable with faster average download speeds, but here is the killer for me. The maximum they offer for uploads is 5mb on their XXL package. It is not all bad news, it is well documented Virgin do not restrict the broadband speeds if the user’s usage is deemed as heavy. BT’s policy is to restrict the user’s speed (both up and down) for several hours which is unreasonable in my opinion. If a user pays for the premium of having high speed broadband, then he has the right to use the broadband as he deems fit so long as they are not knowingly breaking any laws.
According to various posts on ThinkBroadband.com, Virgin are throttling users on USENET ports as well, so if you thought you could bypass any P2P ports by using Newsgroups I’m afraid you’re out of luck. I have no information if BT do the same thing but it’s highly likely they do.
ThinkBroadband.com have a very good guide on Fibre Broadband. Click here for the link.
