I've had AT&T's U-verse service since October 2009, the day we moved into our house. At it's heart, it's really a fantastic service offering... IPTV, whole home DVR, advanced DSL, all wrapped up into a nice package. But for the last 6 months I've been struggling with a lot of different issues ranging from broken DVRs, freezing TV signal to Internet connections that go away at random. While the issues have not been persistent enough to track down an exact cause, they've been frustrating. The other day, after watching Face Off on HBO (for the first time, I know) and getting right to the climax of the movie, the whole TV signal froze and wouldn't come back. It was 1AM and my wife was already sleeping, so I muted by frustration and went to be deciding to look into alternatives the next day. Monday, I called up the two traditional cable providers in the area looking for pricing. Then, I hit Twitter with my plan:

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While Verizon here in the United States is playing around with somewhat unrealistic 10Gbps Internet connections they'll never be able (or willing) to offer to consumers at a reasonable price, Virgin Media in the UK announced that in December their going to begin offering 100Mbps download speeds (with a very respectable 10Mbps upstream) for £35 (roughly $55 USD) per month with a bundle, and £45 ($71 USD) for standalone service. Virgin claims this is 20x as fast as the average British household. Further more, they intend to expand the service with faster speeds later on. They claim their infrastructure can support up to 400Mbps in the near future. According to Virgin:

... research has shown the service will truly come into its own when more than one person in a household is using the service at the same time. Following trials of 100Mb and 200Mb speeds, the company found internet usage increased exponentially ...

Duh. Virgin is also throwing in an energy efficient modem and wireless-N router to the package. They estimate the service will be available to 13 million homes at launch, with more on the way as they expand the reach of their network. Meanwhile, after I post this using my AT&T U-Verse connection in the states, which is about a 10th as fast as what Virgin is offering, and about twice as expensive, I'm going to be looking up flights to the UK around the end of this year. Hope my wife is ready to move.

According to Craig Labovitz at security company Arbor Networks, Google's domination of the network that is the Internet is now averaging at about 6.4% of all traffic. This is up a full 1% since the start of the year. As Labovitz  says:

If Google were an ISP, as of this month it would rank as the second largest carrier on the planet. Only one global tier1 provider still carries more traffic than Google (and this ISP also provides a large portion of Google’s transit).

According to Arbor, Google is actually growing faster than the Internet itself.