UPC has today announced that it will double broadband speeds for new customers.
At a new product launch, the company said that the download speed of its entry-level broadband product will go from 25Mbps to 50Mbps. In addition, UPC has also increased the maximum speed available on its domestic network from 100Mbps to 150Mbps.
UPC’s 25Mb, 50Mb and 100Mb products will be replaced by 50Mb, 100Mb and 150Mb. Upload speeds will also increase across the product line.
The new products and bundles will be €3 more expensive than their predecessors. Existing customers can also upgrade to the new speeds for an additional €3 per month.
At 50Mb, UPC's entry-level broadband product is now twice as fast as the highest speed currently available over the DSL phone-line based broadband network at 24Mb.
A connection achieving a speed of 50Mb would enable customers to download a 700MB feature length movie in under two minutes. At 150Mb, the same movie could be downloaded in less than forty seconds.
UPC maintains that speeds of 50Mb are achievable for the majority of people on the UPC network. Customers on the upgraded network will be able to avail of the higher speed products.
Currently UPC broadband service is available to over 500,000 homes in mainly urban areas across the country.
UPC’s sales and marketing director Mark Coan said at the product launch that “consumer bandwidth requirements continue to grow with the proliferation of devices in homes and the increasing integration of video into the web."
He also revealed that UPC has seen its customers’ data requirements quadruple in the last four years with average customer data usage going from just 12GB to 48GB per month. He said that this increase in data consumption has been seen across all Internet Services Providers and is expected to continue to increase.
Mr Coan said that the increase in download speeds helps to address the need for more bandwidth and “re-defines what constitutes the minimum acceptable broadband speed to the Irish market”.
To wrap up their new product launch, UPC ran a download speed demonstration to showcase the capabilities of their network (see picture below).
The connection speed peaked at 1.4Gbps (that’s 1,400 Mbps in case you were wondering). They said that the “last-mile” connection was over regular cable – the same stuff that runs into most of their customers’ houses.
