UK Cable provider Virgin Media says they're experimenting with a new deep packet inspection solution that will snoop into customer packets to determine if they're trading copyrighted files. The trial will cover 40% of the company's customers, though no action will be taken against users (nor will they be informed of the snooping). The CView technology being used is the same gear used by behavioral advertising firm Phorm. With much P2P traffic being encrypted and such gear still not able to detect all P2P details, this could be a wild goose chase -- but it appears the ISP wants to get out ahead of the UK government's effort to turn ISPs into Internet content babysitters.

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.

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.