TL;DR; A personal account of UK cable internet speed improvements, comparing dial-up, ADSL, and Virgin Media, with real-world download rates and upgrade experiences.

I have been a cable customer in the UK since day one when it was Cable & Wireless.
If you don’t know who they are I am not surprised:
Cable & Wireless –> NTL –> VirginMedia
I received my first cable modem in 1998 (ish) which was 512 kbs.. much better than ye ole Dial-up, but while ADSL has lagged behind, cable have rocketed up to 50mbs this year.
With my new job at SSW , I needed a faster internet connection. Ever since I moved house 5 years ago it has been a little slow, so I opted for Virgins 50mbit.
Now I thought it would be fast, but OMG:
I just downloaded Project 2010 in under 3 minutes… Did you notice the important figure in the image above?
Transfer Rate: 3.201 MB/sec
That’s not megabit! that’s Megabyte"!
Here is the speed in your flavour of choice:
=25.608 Mbps [Megabit-per-second]
=25608 Kbps [Kilobit-per-second]
=3.201 MB/sec [Megabyte-per-second]
=3201 KB/sec [Kilobyte-per-second]
http://www.mediaroad.com/products/speedcheck/free_tools/unit_convert/
And that’s not the fastest it was ripping Project from the Microsoft site, it was just the speed when my PrtScr kicked in… it was up around the 4.xx mark!
We have come a long way since 56k in such a short time, and I am loving it….
(Update 06/12/2009)
Before upgrade (was on 20mbs):
After Upgrade (now on 50mbs):
(Update 07/12/2009)
it just gets better and better:
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