While 100Mbps just became the high broadband watermark here in the States, Virgin Media in the UK is already testing 200Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 cable connectivity, according to the Financial Times and the Guardian. But do you need it? Can servers provide it? Can Virgin deliver the 50Mbps speeds they're promising now? Who cares, it's fast, says Virgin CEO Neil Berkett. "Two years ago, when we were testing 50Mbps, you would have asked what that was needed for," Berkett says, after suggesting that 3D video conferencing could make such connections useful. "In two years’ time, where people are now asking about how many people are taking up 50Mbps, they will be asking what is the take-up of 200Mbps." As we saw last week, offering ultra high speed broadband is more about branding and bragging rights than practicality.

Like Comcast here in the States, we've explored how UK cable broadband operator Virgin Media is deploying DOCSIS 3.0 technology, offering a 50Mbps/2Mbps tier for 51 pounds ($76.73) per month on a standalone basis, or 35 pounds a month when taken with an 11 pound phone line. Apparently, hackers in the UK have taken advantage of the upgrades to nab free service. According to the Register, about 1,000 hackers managed to "apply the new configuration from Virgin Media's official up to 50Mbit/s home modem to legacy DOCSIS 1.0 hardware," allowing them to nab speeds up to 30Mbps -- for free. The hackers say the cloned modems make them untraceable, though Virgin says "that's absolutely not the case".

Yesterday we noted that UK broadband operator Virgin media has launched 50Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 service, the company telling us they wouldn't be implementing the type of throttling common on their other tiers at launch. The company wouldn't specify that they wouldn't be throttling the tier at a future date, suggesting Virgin's maximizing the good PR of ultra-fast speeds before bringing down the bandwidth buzzkill hammer later -- when the press and public aren't paying as close attention.

Virgin uses an approach that's quite novel to us Yanks (unless you're a U.S. satellite broadband customer): a time-restrictive throttling system that throttles users back for five hours to 50-75% of their subscribed bandwidth should they cross a certain threshold during peak times.

Around the world, the planet's largest ISPs have been whining. They've been whining about how the dropping cost of bandwidth & hardware, their significant profit margins, and abundant new revenue streams (advertising via webmail, BVAS, selling your clickstream data, DNS Redirection revenue, charging to get around spam filters, targeted behavioral advertising) make it hard for a poor, cash-strapped telecom conglomerate to build out enough capacity to handle user demand.

In the UK, ISPs have been complaining for a year that the BBC's new media player actually uses bandwidth, so they've tried to argue the BBC should subsidize their network expansion.

This kind of logic was what started the entire "network neutrality" debate in the U.S.