re cable :
virgin cable is in my area, but their pricing for the premium products doesnt yet present the same value as say be’s offerings, ie virgin 50mb is too expensive a monthly for unlimited, and also virginmedia is one of the companys where i dont trust what traffic shaping and controls and limitations they might put in place regardless of their speed.
fair use and unlimited :
truth is its to do with the words unlimited and fair use etc most months i download hardly anything, i might view allot of youtube videos etc, but its more important to feel that if i wanted to download allot one month that the facility would be there and not limited, and to me 250gb would seem a fair limit, but i currently dont really know how much a months worth of iplayer and youtube usage adds up to ? but ideally a package should be unlimited at first and if, that doesnt work as a framework, then introduce generous limits that 90% of customers would be happy with.
whats important for an isp to maintain :
I beleive that certain Isp’s offerings when they say unlimited are genuinely made and to some extent are not too interested in controlling what theyre users use the broadband for except in obviously abusive download cases. Whereas virgin media being a media company, I would trust less to be impartial, as such my support rests with non media owning isp’s at the moment. This integrity of nature and independance of stance within the internet market is the prime factor for me, i have moved many of my clients and myself away from isps previously because theyre deals became skewed by traffic shaping, or to heavy handed fair use policys etc, or protocol banning etc. For me it is better for the internet to remain an open place for that is its strength, and rely on a light handed approach to controlling the way in which internet is used, and dealing only with the obvious and worst abusers etc. For instance Bulldog became rubbish once they were taken over so i left for bethere, metronet became rubbish once they were bought by plusnet I have moved most of my business clients away from them because of this. Whatever you offer fibre wise it need to retain its integrity as an offering.
re faster fibre :
Obviously its no good having a 50mb/100mbit connection, if traffic shaping and contention ratios, fair use policys and infrastructure at the isp end, and the general infrastructure of the internet within the isp the country and internationally isnt capable of delivering the benefits of these speeds, ie holistic and harmonious infrastructure investment to the customers home, is important, certainly fibre investment is very important and presumably Bt’s infinity band is working on delivering a new fibre infrastructure as at the moment fibre is currently the future of where increased speeds will come from, virgin sort of has a monopoly in this area, and really for competition and investment to occur this needs to be opened up either to be shared as an infrastructure ? or for more cable to be laid, the fact that when the original cable was laid in the UK, they stopped due to financial costs of infrastructure creation highlights, how all isp’s and bt should go in on this cost together, otherwise as with virgin only certain areas will be covered, it would be important to perhaps create an isp and bt industry wide cooperative group to invest and fund this investment, so as to provide some competition against virgins offering. It may also be when content viewed is analysed that in fact most of the limitations to peoples current activity is caused by transatalantic fibre link capacity, caused by a majority of sites used being resident in the US ? slow delivery of Hd videos on youtube etc, and this would be a wiser investment, but I guess this is probably coming anyway ? but thats a matter for traffic analysis, and perhaps more cache servers this side of the atlantic.