@ Matt Bridge-Wilkinson
Before spouting out your utter rubbish, I suggest you research your facts a little better before you make the assumption that people on 50MB will get 'around 4MB' if there luckly...
Firstly the 50MB service is a totally different form of technology using DOCSIS 3.0 which can support speeds of up to 200MB - this is one of the advantages of this technology!
In order for VM to roll out this software, they have had to make significant upgrades to their network and invest heavily so that users get the 50MB speed advertised or as very close to it - This is also the reason that VM plan to upgrade the 20MB (XL) package onto DOCSIS 3.0 also, again so that customers on that package will also get the speeds advertised...
... When 50MB rolls out, it will be the ONLY company in the UK to offer such speeds, using the latest technology on a more advanced network - ADSL can not come close, the average speeds on standard ADSL has been reported by OFCOM to be around 4.5MB if your lucky and no where near the 8MB advertised (even if you sit on top of the exchange) ADSL to can in theory support 24MB, but again the % of people actually pulling in these speeds is very low!
Comparing ADSL Broadband to Cable Fibre Optic is pointless as the 2 technologies are totally different - throttling is in place on VM to avoid heavy users taking up a huge amount of bandwidth and putting a lot of strain on the local UBRs which 'could' potentially effect others users internet service - this is more to do with fairness than capacity, but again DOCSIS 3.0 is totally different in this aspect, and the network upgraded to easily cope - when 20MB also goes onto this then improvements for people on M & L broadband would also be significant as the higher packages where the heaviest users will more likely be on will cope with this where lite users and people who download a little will be on the old DOCSIS technology!!!!!!
My VM Broadband service has been online about 99% of the time in the whole 6-7yrs I have had it with one fault I can think of where it was offline for about 4hrs - for a broadband service that is always on and always doing something that uptime is fantastic - compared to my family who are on ADSL and have issues with it every few months with connectivity issues, very slow speeds at peak times due to the contention ratio on it, and you can most certainly notice the difference with the 2 - prob why Cable ranks the best with most sites for all areas...