Today I had an e-mail from Virgin to tell me that my broadband is going to be upgraded from 4Mb/s to 10Mb/s.   I won’t complain about that at all.  It sort of vindicates my decision to go with them and not Sky – a decision based on preferring the technology of fibre to the street and bloody great co-axial wires into the house over ADSL on normal telephone wires: a significant difference when you are some way from an exchange.

The ironic thing is that this mail was in a batch that arrived after a day or two without mail from the blueyonder accounts.   When my client polls my various mail servers it has been throwing up errors saying it was unable to access the POP3 server at Virgin – and then it all unblocked this evening and I got all the backlog in one go.  Looking at the properties on the Virgin email shows that it was sent today at 17:17 from a Virgin mail server and was received by me on my Virgin broadband at 19:57.  That is 2 hours and 40 minutes just within Virgin’s own networks – it didn’t go near the Internet.

It wasn’t worrying me too much.  Most of my mail comes through the skuds.org server anyway, and I had forgotten that outgoing mail still goes via Virgin.  With them now having a premium rate number for broadband I tend not to be in a hurry to call them.

Anyway… a big thumbs up for increasing the bandwidth at some as yet unspecified time in the future for no extra cost, but all the bandwidth in the world won’t help if the servers at the other end are stuffed.  If its going to be a case of never mind the quality feel the (band)width I would rather stick to 4Mb/s.