Faster and faster
ntl have had a lot of bad press and more than their share of complaints over the past X years, much of it unfortunately extremely justified. And all that’s before we even start on their inability to utilise capitals in abbreviations.
As a company, they’re pretty inconsistent. When they do things badly, they majorly screw up. In the rare circumstances when they do something well, they usually manage to do it very well.
One of their big successes has been their broadband service, apart from the few hundred customers their billing systems randomly disconnect every now and then. Since the service was originally launched, they’ve regularly been pushing up the speeds in order to either keep up with the competition, or even lead the market at several points. In the time I’ve been connected, I’ve seen my speed increase from 512kbps to 600kbps, then 750kbps, then 1Mbps (which actually will be 2Mbps whenever I get around the phoning them and getting an engineer around to replace my aging Pace DITV-2000 with a shiny new Samsung). Their current flagship product reaches 3Mbps. Until today that is.
ntl have announced further speed increases today, taking ALL connections up to 10Mbps eventually when upgrades have rolled out across the network during 2006 (hmmm… I’m still waiting for a new version of CR3 and VOD to rollout across the network, so we’ll see about their infamous timescales). Service levels will be differentiated by different cap levels (the amount of data you can download every month) rather than speed. The anti-cap brigade won’t be happy, but they rarely are - at least their warez and porn will download faster, even if they can’t download any more than they can at the moment.
This is quite an announcement from ntl. It’s certainly a major leap from 3Mbps to 10Mbps - and something that most people were predicting wouldn’t happen for a few years. If ntl pull this off, they’ll have a service unbeatable by the current ADSL competition.
I’m guessing this may not be the end of the upgrades either. The current cable network can support speeds up to 30-50Mbps. With advances in compression technology, I’m sure we’ll see that go even higher. Even if they don’t need to for competition reasons, imagine the new revenue streams to be exploited by pushing new types of content down those super fat pipes. Then of course its another option of delivering HDTV.
Hopefully the surge ahead on the broadband front will be reflected in other areas of the business soon: DTV, VOD, STB software and a PVR, not to mention their internal billing systems and customer service, etc (did somebody mention “merger”?). Credit where credit’s due though.