Virgin Media to start next round of speed upgrades in October

We covered potential speed upgrades by Virgin Media earlier this year and it seems that the upgrades for customers are set to start in October 2015.

The upgrades will see those with the 50 Mbps product upgraded to 100 Mbps, 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps and 152 Mbps to 300 Mbps, though as with other upgrades Virgin Media is more vague about what will happen to upload speeds.

While this means Virgin Media will have a top end product almost four times faster than Openreach FTTC, it will not count as the fastest provider in the UK, as people like Hyperoptic, Gigaclear and other Gigabit providers continue to grow. What will mean though is advertising making the most of comparisons to BT, any comparisons with Sky and TalkTalk may be more difficult if their 940 Mbps FTTP roll-out in York goes to plan.

We still see Virgin Media customers who do not appear to be on the current baseline product but this may be people who have actively refused the upgrades for various reasons. The last round of upgrades took six months to a year to officially complete and with 42% of Virgin Media customers on the 100 or 152 Mbps products we will be able to track the roll-out by watching the median and mean speeds growing for Virgin Media in the mainly urban areas they serve.

For those in areas of the Virgin Media network where rapidly growing bandwidth use leads to peak time slow downs and latency issues that affect gaming and voip we hope that the network upgrades will be accompanied by a substantial series of upgrades in capacity to improve the Quality of Service.

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