PJCNET

Introduction

At the time of writing on the 3rd September 2010, I’ve been using Virgin’s Media’s XXL fibre optic cable broadband service for almost 6 months, so it’s about time I wrote a full review.

Virgin Media currently offer up to 50Mb/S download speeds which is still equally the fastest mainstream home broadband download speed in the UK along with Small World Cable who offer very similar cable services for people living in Northern England and Scotland. What’s more, a selection of UK households have been happily Beta testing a much faster 100Mb/S service for sometime now and Virgin Media are planning to officially start rolling out their new 100Mb/S service by the end of this year, although it may not be available to all fibre optic cable customers until some time in 2011. Once the 100Mb/S service is available to all Virgin Media customers, there’s imminent plans to double the maximum download speed yet again to a massive 200Mb/S which has already been trialled by a few very lucky households in Kent with a planned mainstream release as early as 2012. Virgin Media’s existing VMNG300 router which is currently used for their 50Mb/S XXL broadband service is already compatible with the new 100Mb/S service and it can even cope with the imminent 200Mb/S service since it’s currently being used in their 200Mb/S trials already, but Virgin Media are already working on a brand new router that’s capable of even faster speeds of up to 400Mb/S. This is a virtual proof that incredibly fast 400Mb/S download services are being planned for release after 2012 (I guess by 2014). The more distant future looks even better for Virgin Media as their existing fibre optic cables could eventually support speeds as fast as 1Gb/S (Roughly 1000Mb/S) or perhaps even more with later technology (I guess we’ll have 800Mb/S by 2016 and 1000Mb/S broadband by 2017 – It will be interesting to see as the future progresses).

It’s still uncertain whether Virgin Media will be automatically upgrading all their their existing 50Mb/S fibre optic cable broadband customers to 100Mb/S speeds, or whether it will be sold as an even faster premium service in addition to their existing 50Mb/S package. The price of the new faster service is also currently still uncertain, although since their premium 50Mb/S broadband package is already in my opinion quite expensive, I sincerely hope Virgin Media will be charging no more for their faster 100Mb/S service when it becomes available soon. I suspect Virgin Media will upgrade everyone to 100Mb/S automatically, especially since the existing VMNG300 router which currently used for 50Mb/S speeds definitely won’t need replacing, but they could instead use this golden opportunity to force existing customers to sign up to new 12 month contracts if they want their broadband service upgraded to 100Mb/S for free. Virgin Media are in my opinion unlikely to automatically increase the speed of their existing cheaper 10Mb/S and 20Mb/S services in line with their faster premium service since the router supplied for these services isn’t capable of speeds above 20Mb/S. As far as a potential price increase, I suspect Virgin Media will only increase the price slightly above inflation, but probably not straight away as they’ll want to promote the new faster service to get more customers signed up to 12 month contracts first.

Is the 50Mb/S service really as good as Virgin Media claim?

During the first 2 months of service I received actual speeds between 35Mb/S and 50Mb/S which I thought was very good, although over the last couple of months I’ve been delighted to get speeds of 50Mb/S consistently 24/7, 7 days a week. I really am getting 50Mb/S too as it can be seen when directly downloading files quicker than 6MB/S (over 48 Megabits/S). I suspect that Virgin Media have generally improved their network further to allow for enough bandwidth for their imminent 100Mb/S service release, hence why 50Mb/S download speeds are now reliably consistent.

Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) advertise their download speed, yet most don’t say much about their upload speed, well with Virgin Media I’ve been receiving consistent upload speeds of around 1.6Mb/S which doesn’t sound like much, but when compared with other ISPs it’s still quite fast, it’s also not too bad when Virgin Media only advertise potential upload speeds of 1.5Mb/S. Some customers however would like to see faster upload speeds even if it meant cutting their download speed down slightly and BT Infinity, a new rival cable service from BT is offering the fastest upload speeds available in the UK with up to a massive 10Mb/S speed on their top package, but their download speed suffers slightly at up to 40Mb/S with no imminent plans to increase this any time soon, unlike Virgin Media who will very soon be providing a 100Mb/S download service with a 200Mb/S download service planned in 2012. BT Infinity is currently only available to a small percentage of the UK population at the time of writing, but the service is being quickly rolled out across the UK and BT plan to cover 40% of the UK population before the end of 2012. Unfortunately however it’s still likely to be as late as 2017 before as much as 90% of the UK population have access to super fast broadband since this was the last target set by the most recent Labour government and this target will probably continue to stand with the current Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government. If you’re planning on running a small web server, then BT Infinity is currently the only real low budget solution because of it’s fast upload speed, the alternative is to shell out a relative fortune on a dedicated line. BT Infinity’s super fast 10Mb/S upload service is obviously also much better for uploading large files like video’s to YouTube Etc, but if you’re mainly browsing and downloading, then Virgin Media’s premium service is still the best, especially in the near future. The imminent mass availability of BT Infinity to most UK households does however have some very interesting future implications since it’s very likely that BT will be then expected by OFCOM and/or The Competition Commission (formerly known as The Monopolies & Mergers Commission) to rent out their new super-fast fibre optic cable network to other rival Internet service providers (ISPs) so they can also offer their customers super-fast broadband in the same way as numerous rival ISPs currently offer broadband services using BT lines (LTU Internet). Incidentally, Virgin Media’s 100Mb/S download service is likely to have a better 3Mb/S upload speed and the 200Mb/S download service is likely to have an 6Mb/S upload speed which still doesn’t catch up to BT Infinity’s top service. In my opinion Virgin Media should release 2 premium packages giving the customer a choice, the first package should remain as it is with the maximum download speed and a relatively slow upload speed, while the other package should have a much larger upload speed at the expense of cutting this from the download speed.

Please remember that when downloading from the Internet, your actual download speed is only as quick as the slowest connection encountered during the data’s journey across the World Wide Web and it can’t be any quicker than the server you’re connected to or it’s actual connection speed which can be shared by many users. In other words, often websites are slow no matter how fast your broadband connection is. In fact whether you have a 15Mb/S, a 50Mb/S or even a 100Mb/S connection, it won’t make most websites noticeably load any quicker at the time of writing, but as time and technology moves on, more and more servers will connect at faster speeds, making it more of an advantage to connect using a super fast fibre optic broadband connection. You will find that you can download some files quicker with a super fast connection as long as the server you’re connected to isn’t overloaded with users and it has a fast connection Etc.

Whether Virgin Media’s premium service is really as good as it claims continues to be answered in the sections below…

Will the 100Mb/S and 200Mb/S service be as good as Virgin Media claim?

I can only speculate and make a calculated guess until the faster services become available to mainstream customers, so I could be totally wrong, but I suspect that 100Mb/S customers would only get the full 100Mb/S during off-peak times at first, but I would also still expect a minimum speed of around 70Mb/S during heavy usage times which would still be amazingly good. When the newer 200Mb/S service release draws closer, I would expect Virgin Media to further improve their network bandwidth allowing their 100Mb/S customers to always get 100Mb/S consistently 24/7, 7 days a week. The same will probably be true when the 200Mb/S service is released around 2012/2013 where I’d expect customers to only get 200Mb/S at off-peak times and a minimum of around 140Mb/S during the heaviest usage times. I can only speculate even further, but I’d expect a 400Mb/S service to be imminent by then and when the release of this service draws closer I’d expect 200Mb/S customers to actually get 200Mb/S at all times and so on.

Customer Services and Technical Support:

Most broadband providers unfortunately have a much lower standard of customer service than expected. Virgin Media’s customer service could do with some improvements, although I’ve had mixed experiences, both good and bad, so I won’t put this under advantages or disadvantages.

Virgin Media’s customer services aren’t open 24/7 which can be very annoying, although at least their 1st line technical support is available 24/7, but if a fault proves to be more in depth, you’ll probably have to wait until the full team are available during office hours. For my worst Virgin Media customer service experience, please see the 3rd disadvantage below regarding low credit limits.

One good experience of Virgin Media’s customer service was when I called for technical support since various websites weren’t loading even though they were up and running on my friends PC, it was found to be a routing problem which was temporarily resolved by putting me through a proxy service until the fault was rectified within a couple of hours. The person I spoke to had a good technical knowledge and knew exactly how to go about diagnosing and ultimately rectifying the problem, he was friendly and fairly easy to understand with well spoken English. Even though Virgin Media’s technical support staff are probably still working from a call centre in India, it really doesn’t matter as long as they provide a good service and are easy to understand. I would like to compare my experience to BT Total Broadband’s technical support that’s provided by BT India. I’m certainly NOT racist in any way, but unfortunately as an English person I found many of the BT technical staff extremely difficult to understand over the phone and there was often a complete communication breakdown where it was made pretty obvious that English was the 2nd language of the person dealing with my query. I suspect that Virgin are more choosy when choosing their technical support staff, ensuring that they speak very good English and they probably train them better too. This doesn’t appear to be the case with BT India’s technical support staff that usually can’t be easily understood by an English speaking person and they are clearly reading their support information from a fixed flow chart of questions, answers and resolutions that certainly don’t work for all technical problems. Most BT India technical support staff don’t appear to be able to diagnose a problem themselves when there’s a need and often don’t even understand when technical words are spoken by the customer. It’s in my opinion unfair on Indian staff to be forced to provide technical support to UK, English speaking people when English isn’t their first language for what’s most likely only a fraction of the wage paid to employees living in the UK. Unfortunately with BT Total Broadband, if one wants English technical support that is more understandable with reasonably knowledgeable and well trained support staff, you have to pay extra for their premium BT Home IT support which is in my opinion very unfair, especially if you’re pulling you’re hair out trying to get BT to fix a fault or a problem that’s BT’s responsibility anyway.

The next example might not involve a broadband fault, but it still gives a good example of Virgin Media’s technical support service generally. I once had an intermittent TV problem where my programmes were briefly interrupted by what appeared to be a poor signal as the screen would become pixelated, technical support run various remote tests that reset my Virgin box while talking over the phone. This unfortunately didn’t resolve or show a problem and it was therefore passed to another technical team that resolved my problem within a day, they called me back to let me know the problem was rectified and to ask me to let them know immediately if there was any more problems, but it’s been perfect ever since.

Virgin Media’s phone queuing system can be busier than one would like, although I’ve rarely waited more than 5 minutes and one can choose the genre of music one listens to while waiting (a nice touch). Customer service staff are generally polite and easy to understand over the phone, but one can still often be passed from one department to the next when trying to resolve some queries.

Advantages of Virgin Media’s 50Mb/S Service (Soon to be 100Mb/S):

1….Cheap or Free Installation Including Phone line:

At the time of writing Virgin Media are offering free installation, but it normally costs £35 which includes a personal home visit from an engineer and all equipment except of course a telephone itself. BT were charging a massive £127.99 (was £125 before that) for new phone lines where an engineer visit was required and Virgin therefore used to offer a big advantage here, but this has recently been massively reduced to £29.99 or it’s free if you take their broadband, this is obviously due to fierce competition between BT and Virgin Media.

2….Super fast 50Mb/S Speeds That Are NOT Effected By Location (Soon to be 100Mb/S):

Because Virgin Media exclusively use fibre optic cables, the maximum download speed is barely effected by your location and download speeds really are 50Mb/S on their top package at the time of writing, unlike standard ADSL services over your standard phone like which are directly effected by the distance you happen to live from your local telephone exchange. Often standard ADSL services will advertise speeds up to 20Mb/S or even up to 24Mb/S speeds when barely anyone manages to actually get very close to the maximum, in fact a 16Mb/S speed is excellent and quite rare, while some customers could be unlucky enough to only get 4Mb/S or even less if their local telephone exchange is quite a few miles away from their home. At the time of writing, the only rival mainstream cable service to Virgin Media is BT Infinity which offer speeds up to 40Mb/S along with an optional super fast 10Mb/S upload speed (best in the UK), but the service is still in it’s infancy, meaning it’s only currently available to low percentage of customers throughout the UK even though BT are working very hard to roll out the network to most customers as quickly as possible, also there’s no plans to upgrade BT Infinity to super fast speeds that with rival Virgin’s Media’s brand new 100Mb/S service any time soon.

3….Truly No Download Limits on 50Mb/S XXL Package (hopefully the same on 100Mb/S services soon):

At the time of writing Virgin Media state that there’s no fair usage download limits on their premium 50Mb/S service when one reads their acceptable use policy (fair usage policy) and their traffic management policy in detail and the real limits are clearly advertised for their cheaper packages (10Mb/S and 20Mb/S download speeds) during peak times where customer’s will be throttled if these limits are exceeded. Despite this, Virgin Media unfortunately don’t go out of their way to directly advertise that their premium XXL broadband service is truly unlimited, so I’m still a little apprehensive about whether they’d actually ever warn someone for extreme excess downloading during peak times or whether they plan on changing this policy in future (I sincerely hope not). Sky however advertise their premium broadband 20Mb/S service (up to) as truly unlimited and some customers have been known to download 24/7 constantly without any problems what-so-ever as Sky clearly promise never to throttle or take action against any customer for excessive downloading.

4….No throttling & Consistently Fast Speeds on 50Mb/S package [THIS HAS NOW CHANGED - PLEASE SEE RED TEXT BELOW] (hopefully the same on the 100Mb/S package coming soon):

Update 17th December 2010: Virgin Media have recently started throttling peer 2 peer downloading and uploading at certain times of the day (5pm-12pm weekdays and 12pm-12pm weekends) – this isn’t good news at all even though only peer 2 peer traffic like torrents and alternative high usage file-sharing sites are effected. Much faster upload speeds of 5Mb/S are currently being rolled out to soften the blow and everyone will have much faster upload speeds enabled by late 2011. If anyone however uploads at the new faster speeds excessively, they will be temporarily throttled back to the slower upload speed before the upgrade (I suppose one can’t really complain about that). Faster 100Mb/S speeds are also being rolled out throughout 2011, but it’s not clear if Virgin Media will then choose to change their pricing structure or perhaps they’ll force existing customers to take on new 12 month contracts to get the increased 100Mb/S speeds, only time will tell. Incidentally a possible way around the peer 2 peer throttling problem could be to use a good seedbox, but this of course costs extra on top of an already expensive premium Internet service and Virgin Media already throttle newsgroups that distribute large amounts of data like Usenet (E.g. other workarounds), so it’s also possible they could also start throttling downloading from some seedboxes if their attention is drawn to them with excessive downloading. There might also be ways to trick Virgin Media using encryption like IPV6 tunnelling, but even if this works, is it really a good idea to go against your ISP like this as they could potentially take adverse action if and when they find out that your purposefully deceiving them to work-around their throttling restrictions that aim to make their system fair for everyone?

PLEASE SEE ALSO SEE THE COMMENTS BELOW THIS ARTICLE, MAINLY “THROTTLING UPDATES” FOR THE LATEST NEWS AND DEBATES ON THE THROTTLING ISSUE, IT ALSO INCLUDES LINKS SO YOU CAN SEE EXACTLY HOW VIRGIN MEDIA’S TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT EFFECTS YOU!

Original advantage (Now outdated):

Virgin Media currently DON’T throttle (slow down) any traffic what-so-ever (THIS HAS CHANGED – SEE RED TEXT ABOVE) on their premium 50Mb/S package no matter how much a customer downloads at the time of writing (also please see “Truly No Download Limits” above). Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) choose to throttle certain types of data, mainly peer to peer downloading (P2P – file-sharing networks including torrents Etc) during peak times, one of the worst culprits I’ve experienced is BT. I’m unsure how much BT will choose to throttle customers on their brand new BT Infinity cable service, but when I was a BT Total Broadband customer, they drastically reduced the speed of peer to peer downloading during peak times. Over time this got even worse and I eventually found I was getting throttled to speeds as slow as 0.5Mb/S during peak times and BT even reserved the right to throttle speeds at other times. I believe throttling began at certain times outside official off-peak hours not long before I changed ISP about 18 months ago at the time of writing when I’d had enough, at the time I could only use peer to peer networks at a decent speeds at extreme off-peak times, E.g. 4am in the morning. BT argue that peer to peer downloading uses a large proportion of their total bandwidth and that by throttling, they can provide a faster broadband service for everyone, but when I was with Sky Broadband, they didn’t have any trouble providing a fast service without any throttling what-so-ever and with truly unlimited downloads when I consistently got speeds my line was capable of 24 hours a day, 7 days a week which was far from true with BT, so in my opinion it comes down to a how good the service is from a particular ISP and how overloaded they are. I strongly suggest people read the terms and conditions of any ISP and Fair Usage Policy in detail before signing up, plus look for reviews like this one.

Virgin Media Cable clearly isn’t overloaded during peak times because there’s no significant slowdown 24/7 at the time of writing. In comparison to Virgin Media providing a constantly fast service, my BT Total Broadband connection around 18 months ago continued to be overloaded in my area despite numerous complaints where BT kept denying the problem even though during peak times my general speed would dramatically reduce to between 0.5Mb/S and 2Mb/S. Over time BT broadband speeds at peak times got progressively worse and eventually speeds began to become adversely effected even at semi-off peak times. I found I could only get my full 6.5Mb/S speed during extreme off peak hours (E.g. during the middle of the night at 4am), which proved there was nothing wrong with my line, my local wiring or my PC. Despite this BT India kept repeatedly kept asking me to connect my ADSL router (BT Home Hub) into the local test socket and to run their official BT line speed checker which they incidentally told me was an Internet speed checker, IT WASN’T and ISN’T, it instead only measures the speed of the line itself from the customer to the local BT Exchange. This line speed check result isn’t effected by the amount the broadband service is overloaded due to poor contention ratios (the amount of customers sharing each direct Internet connection) and it therefore always returned a near perfect test result. Unfortunately due to overloading, my real Internet speed wasn’t even close to what BT kept saying I was getting, but attempting to explain this simple fact to BT India technical support staff proved to be totally and utterly impossible. It took months of complaining to various different BT departments, speaking to numerous different people and even managers before anything was finally done to address the real overloading issue. At one stage I was even told that I’d have to pay for their chargeable home technical support service by a manager which was crazy since the problem was most definitely caused by overloading beyond the BT Exchange and certainly not by my PC or local wiring (incidentally, I’ve worked in PC technical support for many years). Eventually after I escalated my complaint repeatedly they sent me a BT engineer to my home free of charge which was totally pointless since he confirmed what I’d been trying to tell BT for months, that BT were overloaded from the BT Exchange and there was obviously nothing he could do by simply visiting my property. Unfortunately even though the BT engineer admitted this, it still took another month of complaining to BT, stating this fact repeatedly before I eventually saw any improvement and the service was still quite poor at peak times when I finally left BT. This experience of BT broadband and other stories of poor service I could also write about stops me from even considering or recommending BT now or in the near future even though I sincerely hope BT have since improved, especially with their new super fast BT Infinity Service.

Disadvantages of Virgin Media’s 50Mb/S Service (Soon to be 100Mb/S):

1….Not available to all:

In February 2010 Virgin media’s fibre optic cable services was available to roughly 51% of the UK population which is around 12.6 million homes, so you still have to be lucky to get it. It wouldn’t be great if you decided to move home during your 12 month contract to somewhere where Virgin cable wasn’t available as you’d be liable for breach of contract charges. Also just living in a major city doesn’t necessary mean you’ll be-able to get Virgin cable as various homes were excluded during the main cable installation in the area, especially many flat complexes because it was sometimes considered not financially viable against the high cost of installation due to a low estimated sign up of residents at the time. For instance, I used to live in low rise flat complex near Birmingham City Centre and most people in the area had access to Virgin cable, in fact there was even a Virgin cable box just over the road, yet I couldn’t get access to their fibre optic cable services even though many residents really wanted it. I asked Virgin Media on numerous occasions how long I’d have to wait, explaining that numerous residents wanted to sign up, but Virgin still couldn’t even give me any sort of estimate, except that it could be a number of years. Also even if you’re given an estimated date for Virgin Media to become available in your area, don’t expect them to keep to it! I’ve known people be given estimated installation dates of say 1-2 years that have been and long passed, but when they ask Virgin Media what’s going on, they’re told they’ve got another 1-2 years to wait. Now I’ve moved to a larger flat nearby and I’m lucky to have Virgin cable available.

Unfortunately if you desperately want Virgin Media fibre optic cable services when it’s still not available in your area, the only way one might speed up installation is to get as many residents in your area to write a letter to Virgin Media requesting a service, or at least phone them and ask. If enough people ask, Virgin Media will eventually see the area as financially viable for an installation and they have then been known to install services quicker, although even this isn’t guaranteed.

If Virgin Media’s fibre optic cable service isn’t available they do offer a far inferior and much slower broadband service via a standard phone line (a slow speed of up to 8Mb/S) and TV wouldn’t be possible. I wouldn’t usually recommend this service as there’s normally better deals available from other standard phone line ADSL providers who use ADSL2+ technology to offer speeds up to 20Mb/S (or 24Mb/S) like Sky. Also check as BT Infinity (a new cable service from BT offering up to 40Mb/S) could be available in your area before Virgin Media.

2….It’s more expensive:

Virgin Media’s 50Mb/S is excellent and similar will be expected from their 100Mb/S service which will be available very soon at the time of writing, but it’s also rather expensive when compared to other broadband providers. I have a phone (XL – free calls 24/7), broadband (XXL – 50Mb/S) and TV (XL including HD) + premium movies (non HD) and I’m paying a total of £85.50 just in services charge a month (they currently offer the first 2 months free or at minimal cost depending on the services ordered). At the time of writing this is increasing slightly more in line with Sky’s slight price increase. When compared to a very similar Sky TV, broadband and phone service, Virgin Media is a fair bit more expensive. Although Sky’s up to 20Mb/S broadband was also excellent, it’s still using a standard phone line via ADSL which is much slower, plus the maximum speed is directly effected by the distance you happen to live from your local telephone exchange. Sky’s TV service has more channels than Virgin Media, although Virgin Media has on demand services direct from your Virgin box connected to your TV, especially if you go for a Virgin HD box.

3….Beware of a Low Credit Limit or Be Cut Off Suddenly:

When you join Virgin Media they do a basic credit check and often your credit limit is set very low indeed if you have a low credit score, although this isn’t even mentioned at the time of sale. For instance, I found that I could only spend up to £40 over my monthly service charge on both phone calls or premium on demand services before automatically being cut off where I’d have no TV, broadband or phone (well incoming calls only with outgoing calls to Virgin 150). After being with Virgin over 3 months, they increased my limit by just £25 after paying every bill perfectly by direct debit each month. Since this limit isn’t made clear when joining, many very annoyed customer’s are cut off suddenly even though their bill isn’t even due for payment and usually it’s automatically paid by direct debit. On calling Virgin Media for help, customers are often treated as badly as if they haven’t paid their bill at all and they have to pay straight away to get their services restored so the total owed is below the credit limit. It’s obviously money that isn’t due and not budgeted for at the time, but if Virgin Media customers don’t happen to have the money readily available at the time, it’s hard cheese, they won’t have any services what-so-ever until they do pay and complaining doesn’t help either. If someone is unlucky enough to notice they’re cut off out of Virgin Media’s normal office hours, they’ll have to wait until Virgin Media’s customer services are open again to sort the problem out and it can be a number of hours (they say up to 24 hours) before they’re turned back on even after this unexpected payment has been made.

Virgin Media went one stage worse and completely messed up my credit limit since they only initially gave me up to 20Mb/S broadband when I asked for 50Mb/S, the engineer came back a week of so later to install my 50Mb/S broadband, but within literally 15 minutes after the engineer left, all my services where suddenly cut off since the credit limit was wrongfully still set for the less costly 20Mb/S even though I was now using the 50Mb/S service. The way I was treated was absolutely disgusting and I ended up being forced to make 2 unexpected payments that weren’t even due and Virgin Media still didn’t restore my services after paying the 1st agreed amount when they then later demanded even more, please read my article titled Virgin Media Scandal – Suspended Account – Over Credit Limit! for full details.

Illegal File Sharers Beware of Virgin’s Anti-Piracy Policy:

I have given this issue a separate heading as I didn’t see it fair on Virgin Media to put this down as a disadvantage as people who illegally file share copyrighted material are breaking the law and are severely damaging the music, movie and gaming industries, yet often the worst pirates are the first people to complain about the shortage of quality new releases.

Music and movie piracy is so common that most people don’t even think of it as illegal these days and virtually any music track or movie is available on-line as a free download, plus many movies are even available instantly to watch on-line without paying a penny in royalties. With most people owning at least one digital MP3 player, E.g an Ipod and with many more PCs, especially portable PCs Etc, more people need music tracks in digital MP3 format and this encourages illegal music downloads even more as it’s much easier to download a music track rather than ripping it from an original CD, but obviously most people don’t possess the original CDs to start with. In fact music CD sales are down even though an average person possesses more music tracks than ever before, often mainly pirated. Illegal music downloading is now totally and utterly out of control and illegal movie downloading is gradually catching up, the UK government is therefore currently receiving the most pressure to help dramatically prevent this piracy from the music industry and eventually will be forced to take unpopular action.

People might wonder why there’s not as many PC games on the market as console games, well it’s partly because it’s harder to makes games run well on so many different PCs with numerous different specifications, but it’s also largely because a higher proportion of people pirate PC games than consoles games, even though console game piracy is still a big problem and it’s still greatly reducing both the quantity and quality of games produced on these formats. The problem with PC piracy is it’s now totally out of control and something will need to change soon. In fact there’s usually many times as many pirated top PC game titles around as original copies at any given time and many hardcore gamers rarely part with their money to purchase an original title these days, if ever. As quick as a new protection system is implemented to prevent the piracy of new game releases, the new protection system gets cracked and most mainstream PC games become available to download free within a few days of release. Often new releases are even available on the very day of release and sometimes even earlier than that. Most retail and wholesale outlets take delivery of new game releases before they’re due for public release and it only takes one dodgy outlet to leak a game out before it’s general release to mainstream crackers (if they’re not a cracker themselves). Crackers often compete amongst themselves to be the first to crack new titles, making them quickly and readily available to all as freely downloadable torrents, complete with full instructions about how to easily bypass the game’s anti-piracy protection. It’s no wander many software companies are now choosing to avoid the PC format altogether, while some are instead releasing on-line only games, some of which are even subscription based to ensure they get a reasonable revenue out of their hard work. On-line games are much harder if not impossible to crack since they need to connect to private servers using a unique security key for each original game sold. Many major new games today take a few years to produce with the hard work of a large team of professionals, but software libraries and engines have often been constantly developed and improved over an even longer period, it must be horrible for these people to see all their hard work wasted when many people have already played out and completed their game before it’s even officially released, losing them massive amounts of revenue.

Virgin Media are leading the way among UK Internet Service Providers (ISPs) towards enforcing copyright laws against illegal file-sharing and are already testing new anti-piracy detection and monitoring technology at time of writing. They are being quite secretive about exactly what they’re monitoring and how, but the rumours are that they’re at first monitoring The Pirate Bay and probably a few more popular public trackers, although once tested they could implement the system to monitor a much wider range of file-sharing activities.

Under pressure from privacy campaigners, Virgin Media still claim that no individual person is currently being monitored and at this time it’s only used for statistical purposes across the board, but this is probably just the start of a journey for them to be the very first UK ISP to actively enforce harsh penalties against illegal fire-sharers on a regular basis. Already when a copyright holder complains to Virgin Media about an offending IP address (every PC has one when connected to the Internet), they are likely to send out an official warning letter to the relevant customer concerned threatening further action if they don’t stop their illegal activities in future. Virgin Media will probably be much more co-operative and helpful to a copyright holder complaining about illegal file sharing than many rival ISPs who still refuse to take any action against their customers, only releasing their personal details to the copyright holder when a court order is received. Eventually Virgin Media are likely to pioneer a 3 strikes and your out system in th UK where on the 1st strike an offending customer will receive a formal written warning, on the 2nd strike an Internet suspension and an outright ban on the 3rd strike. Music file sharing is likely to be the first type of media to be officially enforced using the 3 strikes system after intense pressure from the music industry, but I’d expect movies, games and other software anti-piracy enforcement to follow shortly afterwards.

Hiding under the protective cover of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that’s less likely to enforce anti-piracy penalties will probably only delay detection and it’s potential penalties. Due to continued pressure on the UK government to dramatically reduce piracy that’s now totally out of control, in the next few years I expect to see the introduction of new mandatory UK anti-piracy laws that will force all ISPs to actively monitor and penalise customers for illegal file sharing, probably using the 3 strikes system as mentioned in the paragraph above. Adverse action taken on the 3 strikes system will most likely be shared nationally across all ISPs, meaning that if you’re banned from one, you’re banned from them all. The new anti-piracy law will fall in line with other countries around the world who have already implemented such laws, like New Zealand for-instance. There are various measures one can currently use to protect oneself against being caught illegal file sharing which I won’t explain here, but no precautions provide full protection no matter what is claimed and if (and when) new mandatory enforcements do become law in the UK, new ISP detection technologies are likely to make avoiding detection virtually impossible.

I expect to see even more low cost legal alternatives to pirating music, movies and games, so they’re wont be any excuses if and when the 3 strikes system becomes law in the UK. One can already download individual music tracks legally and very cheaply on iTunes and there’s many other similar services available. LoveFilm allow customers to rent an unlimited number of movies for a small monthly subscription charge (you can only rent so many movies at once depending on your level of subscription), plus some movies can be watched instantly on-line. Virgin Media have a movie on-demand service available for cable TV customers with a V+ Box where one can rent numerous titles including the latest releases instantly. There’s already a legal way of playing hundreds of recent PC games for a relatively small monthly subscription fee via a service named Metaboli. With Metaboli you’re effectively only renting the game titles and can only play them as long as you subscribe to the service even after you’ve downloaded them to your hard disk. Metaboli’s security and file encryption system is extremely powerful and as far as I know, no-one has managed to crack it allowing them to illegally play all the games for free.

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