I have two use cases to test. First one is a straight direct connection to Virgin Media and the second is to test the speed when I’m VPN’ed in to my employers network.

Virgin Media 50Mb cable broadband speed test

Test 1 – Direct Connection:

Downstream: 44.07Mbps
Upstream: 1.63Mbps

Test 2 – VPN

Downstream: 4.4Mbps
Upstream: 1.45Mbps

Pipex 8Mb ADSL broadband speed test

How does this compare to my old 8Mbps ADSL broadband connection which had a 512Kbps upstream speed? Here are the result for comparison:

Test 1 – Direct Connection:

Downstream: 6.86Mbps
Upstream: 0.44Mbps

Test 2 – VPN

Downstream: 3.90Mbps
Upstream: 0.38Mbps

All in all, the initial speed tests look very promising. I will need to test things out soon by holding a webex teleconference whilst sharing my desktop and some presentation slides. On my old 8Mbps ADSL connection the audio used to break up quite badly. On the new 50Mbps cable connection things should be notably better due to the much faster upload speed.

Virgin Media

Enter Virgin Media with their triple pack which offers cables TV, phone and broadband all in one. The broadband service in my area offers 50Mb downstream and 1.5Mb upstream. Firstly, the deal is pretty good in terms of price. With my new Virgin Media set up I am paying on average £15/month less than what I was paying when I had two separate services; one for phone and broadband and another for satellite TV.

Virgin Media came around to install their service at my home today. I was greatly looking forward to the faster broadband service and interested to find out what sort of set top box I’d set for my TV service. Here’s a run down of what happened during installation. The installer laid in the cable from the junction box outside in to the house. He then discovered that he didn’t have a wireless router for me in his van and asked me if I had been sent one by Virgin Media’s customer services. Nope, nothing. The installer calls up a colleague in the local area and asks him if he has one in his van. No such luck. Installer proceeds with getting cable TV set up. Everything gets plugged in and TV is turned on. For some reason there’s no picture coming through. Therefore, we moves on to the third item which is phone. I’m told that because I want to keep my old number I won’t have a proper phone service from Virgin Media today as my old number still needs to be ported over. So far, nothing is working. The installer proceeds to install the cable modem and we try the connection out on my Macbook Pro. As expected and predicted the installer gets rather nervous and worried that there’s a shinny Apple Mac in front of him. He proceeds to tell me to load Internet Explorer. Clearly he’s never used a Mac before. No worries, I tell him, I actually have Windows XP and Windows 7 installed on my Mac and that I could load Internet Explorer for him. Since I have a web development background, I proceed with Firefox in Mac OS-X anyway and start stepping through the various initialization pages on the Virgin Media initial setup web site. It records my requested email ID, username and password. On the last page of set up there is a long pause as the modem reboots. Unfortunately the modem refuses to allow an open connection to the web even after restarting twice automatically and one after being restarted manually. At this paint the installer gets on the phone to customer services. He is acting and sounding rather frustrated, and I don’t blame him. He’s on hold for 15 minutes, which appears to make him feel a little embarrassed. I would be too, if I was in his shoes! Eventually he gets through and describes the various issues to customer services. Within minutes my broadband is up and running. Apparently I was still behind the Virgin Media firewall and so my account way manually activated by the customer services person on the phone. OK, so next up is TV. Apparently there’s a delay at the headend for provisioning new customers and I’m told my TV service will be running within the hour. Fair dues. The missing wireless router will be sent to me in the post and I should receive it by tomorrow.

Right, so I need to take another day off work to ensure I’m around to receive the package as it will undoubtedly not fit through the small letter box. If only it was all working today, but I guess that’s too much to ask for. I’d have expected at least the physical items to be all installed and working and the rest can no-doubt be configured remotely.

One hour later, my TV service is up and running. The modem is working, but I have to sit on the floor close to the TV where the modem sits and be hooked up via ethernet cable because I have no wireless router (which arrives tomorrow). I’ve still not got a phone service. I have to wait for my old number to be ported. At this point I do not know how long this will take and I suspect it will require a call to customer services, and no doubt a long wait on hold, to get that sorted out.

All in all, from a customer perspective, I’ve not had a very good first day with Virgin Media. No phone, no wireless. I suppose 50% of what I’m supposed to get is “good enough” for Virgin Media.

Ironically, Virgin Media picked up my excitement of about getting their 50Mb broadband service on Twitter and sent me a message which said “@virginmedia: @jupiterorbit Do let us know how it goes “. I’m afraid I had to tell them the truth and let them know that I wasn’t very impressed with their installation process.

The Virgin Media set top box

3G and variations of it first got rolled out in Japan back in 2001. 3G essentially allows you to shift data faster over the mobile phone network thereby opening up many new services and possibilities (such as video telephony and high speed data services for downloading information and surfing the web). WiMax is similar to home wireless technology. Where-as home wifi only reaches out a few hundred feet, WiMax has a much wider range many across kilimeter. It also offers speeds that are far greather than 3G. To WiMax in to reality, just image that you can be anywhere in the city of Mumbai, lets say, and flip open your laptop and get on to the web instantly regardless of where you stand. Work from the park, the local Cafe Coffe Day, from home or at the airport terminal. WiMax allows this and that too at high speed.

The advantage of 3G to mobile phone operators is that there are a lot of phone models in the market aleady which already support 3G out-of-the-box. With further investment in installing 3G transmission towers the basic infrastructure for 3G in India can be rapidly rolled out. WiMax, on the other hand, could take a little longer to become widespread. The equipment necessary to receive WiMax signals isn’t readily available in India yet and transmissions in the WiMax spectrum is some-what limited to date. In India, Tata Communications has been experiementing with a WiMax trial and Bangalore and hopes to expand this across Mumbai and Delhi once spectrum has been allocated.

What really interests me is that WiMax has the potential to reach remote rural populations in India where existing mobile coverage is patchy or non-existant. This would open up the possibility of bridging the digital divide and binging the advantages of access to the Internet to whole new communities. History has shown that Internet access in rural areas of India has been mostly a good thing with a great examples being the e-Choupal project, which enables farmes to get price of grain and seed direct from market instead of going through the middle man via internet terminal in their villages and farms. Access to the internet in rural areas also spreads the influence of better and wider education to all of India’s population, helping to unlock the latant tallent of a youthful and eager work force. Ultimately, however, as technologies like WiMax and 3G reach the masses, it will enable India to innovate and invent in ways it hasn’t done so before. Entepreneurs up and down the country as well as would-be entrepreneurs will suddenly have a new medium to release their ideas through. When I look at the divide between the uptake of broadband internet and mobile telephony in India, the choice today is clear. More Indian’s today own and use a mobile phone and the number of mobile subscribers dwarfs the number of broadband intenet subscribers. Everyone from your ricksha-wala to duba-wala, city slicker to gardener, cleaner to call centre worker now owns a mobile phone and the uptake is unstopable.

Although market saturation of mobile phone ownership is some years off in India, like its global counterparts, Indian telco’s will eventually start to feel the pinch and one way to sustain and increase revenue is to expand sevice offerings. 3G and WiMax will enable Indian telco’s to offer their subscriber base a multitude of new services including premium video content, video to video chat between hand-sets (and cross network), selling software to mobile phone business users and innovating in the burgeoning mobile phone games industry. Like it’s console games counterpart, mobile gaming is booming in International makets and there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be the case in India once the networks enable people to download large files to their phones. Culturally, Indian’s differ in many ways to the world at large and one of those differences is the high value placed on education. Nintendo already realises this and its DS games console, coupled with the plethora of recent educational titles that you play on the Nintendo DS is taking off like hot-cakes. This is a natural appeal and fit with the Indian psychi and mind-set. Finally, 3G will allow Indian users to upload photos and videos from their phones to the web and partipicate in the mobile social networking space beyond the confines of SMS and becomes what is coined as citizen journalists. Indian teleco’s will probably offer a selection of data packages to subscibers, although like the west, most teleco’s will no-doubt standardise data tarrifs on flat rate “eat as much as you like” structures to reduce confusion and streamline billing.

There are countless ways the Indian telco’s and consumers will benefit from 3G and WiMax and I cannot wait for this market to blossom in India. With over 71 countries now offering 3G to its consumers, it’s time for India to join the 3G club and perhaps suplant it altogether with WiMax.