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Even the amount of money it had to pay Usain Bolt to be in those rubbish adverts hasn’t stopped Virgin Media posting its first ever profit, with the media pipe provider managing to end years of UK cable supplier misery and stick £75.9 in the bank this year.
In terms of user numbers, Virgin Media now has 435,000 TiVo subscribers, while 579,000 new customers signed up for its “Superfast” broadband product during 2011 — and half of the new joiners in the last three months of the year paid for premium cable internet connections with download speeds greater than 30Mb. [Virgin via The Guardian]
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Wow nearly seventy six pounds, that’s a big profit
Good to know that if you want the big bucks that rather than start an ISP you can just open an ebay store.
….I’m guessing it’s meant to be Million I can’t see it being Billion
It is nether million or billion, RTFA
Maybe someone should read the source article then apologies for their rude comment. No one writes £75.9 when they mean £75.90
it’s actually Million.
edit button for Gary, edit button for all!
Rubbish adverts? I thought they were great, gave me a good chuckle!
Yeah, they’re great. Don’t know what Gary’s talking about.
Agreed
Yeah, thanks for the 0.70 Mb/s upload speed, Virgin Media. In contrast, the download speed is over 28 times faster.
That’s actually quite good for an upload speed these days. Please, look up how the pipes are divided – it’s not as good as Virgins is normally, but it’s much better than most.
Virgin Media makes first ever profit…for supplying sub-par broadband. Never provided the speeds that I paid for and forced me to endure lots of traffic shaping.
Don’t spend it all at once!!
Hey it’s only £75.90. Richard Branson won’t get much change out of a new beard trimmer from that.
Darrell, I hope that was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek one from you…. I’ve come to expect that you’re one of the people that doesn’t just swallow what Giz say!
Exactly. Maybe he should shop at Morrisons for a bargain!
It’s a pain Virgin Media only concentrate on areas that already have cable layed. If they worked with building companies and lay cables in new-build areas then I’m sure their subscriber numbers would shoot up. Mainly because BT limit speeds while the houses are being built so you’re left clinging to a 500Kbs line until they decide to upgrade you to 1Mbs.
I got told that NTL layed so many cables down that when Virgin Media took over, they decided it would be too expensive to lay new cables so they’re trying to build up their subscriber numbers in the existing cabled areas before they expand their reach.
This is because of the massive amount of debt that NTL was originally in (from laying all the fibre) combined with all the money Virgin borrowed to buy NTL. It’s pretty common for massive ISPs to run this way.
People can try and knock Virgin Media’s internet services as much as they like, but let’s be honest, they have the fastest (and in my experience most reliable) connection of any ISP through their Fibre Optic network.
I pay for 50mbit, it’s actually about 53 and 4.8 upstream, in a couple of months that’s going up to 120mbit, for free, with 12mbit upload.
What’s my alternative? Pay an ADSL company for a max-24mbit connection (in certain areas) through the phone line? With download limits?
Virgin are clearing off NTL’s (and Telewest’s) debt and rapidly expanding their userbase… they’ve got a market cornered being the only fibre optic (cable) supplier. Over the course of the next year where their customers Internet speeds doubles (or more) for free, how is any other ISP going to compete?
While Virgin own the cable network and don’t resell, Virgin will flourish.
You are seriously lucky. Our Virgin connection is the shittest internet connection I have ever used. From 7 in the evenings it is literally unusable, 240p YouTube video fails to load and we’ll register “blisteringly fast” speeds of 0.15mbps. Some super speedy connection. They know that there’s a problem, but have basically said that they can’t be arsed to fix it.
I also have that problem with my YouTube. 360p just does not load. If I change it to 720/1080, it loads super fast. Only YouTube is slow though. Everything else is super quick and I get 50mbit all day every day
I have similar problems with YouTube, but like dutters said, on my Virgin connection, 720 and 1080 load fast. Don’t know why it happens.
Great Virgin, now can you please bother fixing the connections in our area. 0.15mbps at peak time is like some form of bad joke.
I think if you added a simple “m” to the £75.9 there would be less confusion. But that would mean having to proof read an article and that’s not Giz’s style.
Aw stop ruining our fun
To be fair… i like the Bolt adverts haha