We've been asked the following question by a listener to our podcast:

"I have been told by a BT Engineer that my 2mb Broadband connection is unlikely to even reach 1mb performance levels because of distance from the Exchange. I am considering switching to Virgin Media via cable. Will the performance be better? My brother says not necessarily..."

As I'm not with Virgin Media, I'm not sure if we've added thge best answer to this question. Can some of our forum regulars take a look at our answer and let me know if this is correct or needs updating?

http://www.frequencycast.co.uk/cable.html#speed

The difference with Virgin is that you are limited by the distance from the street furniture and the "size" of the package you choose.  They (allegedly) have fibre cables from their "exchanges" to the street furniture. Thing is how do Virgin customers measure the actual throughput speed?  Is there a tool like BT have at www.speedtester.bt.com? Would you ever know the true speed without using independant USA based and commercially dodgy test sites?

With BT you are copper twisted pair all the way from the exchange, so it is dependant on the distance from the exchange,  and the amount of interference you get on your line and home extensions.   BT are working on a new inductive faceplate to reduce interference but I have not seen it available.  See the home hub forum for more info about the interference, including the bellwire trick, which needs to be added to the HH explored pages.

BT cannot possibly widely provide 10Mbps for some years IMHO.  Judging by the forums, 6.5Mbps is quite rare. Virgin may be able to provide very high speeds in the future, if you can afford the price..

This will probably come back to haunt me in years to come, but for me, with neither video nor bittorrent in my portfolio, anything more than 500kbps is fine.