To Infinity and beyond! Sadly, in BT's eyes, I'm way beyond (and Virgin's no better)

Despite what you might read from a slightly rattled Virgin Media about BT's new Infinity broadband, there are a lot of good things to be said for the product.

While all of Virgin Media's claims are valid, the amount of customers their points will affect is perhaps minimal. Few (if any) will really need a 50Mb connection over a 40Mb one, while a 20GB monthly download limit will meet most needs. On home broadband, few will mind the difference between an 18 and 12-month deal, while quibbles over small change in the price and streaming affecting your overall speed also seem minor for most 50Mb service users.

What did strike me interesting about Virgin's attack, though, was the line that Virgin's 50Mb is already available right now to half the country. While this may be true, it’s also fair to say it's not going to go much further. While BT may only reach four million homes this year, it won't take too long after that before it overtakes Virgin's reach. How much further, though, and how fast, is debatable.

It's a particularly galling argument to me (and the millions like me) who can't get Virgin Media or BT's 'super-fast' product. In fact, millions of us still can't get the so-last-week-not-so-fast-any-more 20Mb services available from both companies, while many more are stuck with no chance of getting anything close to 8Mb on an 'up to' 8Mb service.

According to the SamKnows website (which is great for checking where your BT telephone exchange is, and what's inside), my exchange is due for an upgrade to "21CN WBC" (which means I should be able to get 'up to' 20Mb broadband) some time late in the first half of 2011 - pretty lame, as many exchanges have been enabled for this for years. Also, that won’t be ‘future proofed’ for the 40Mb service either. It's fair to say I won't be holding my breath for BT's Infinity broadband.

And, despite being in a somewhat cabled area, my brand spanking new aspiring middle class apartment block can't get Virgin Media either. To give credit where credit's due, we did have a man from Sky banging on the door the other day telling us a dish was being installed and was I interested in signing up. Yes, here, the Sky really is the limit.

Cambridge's main city exchange has almost 24,000 residential premises in its catchment area, while mine has just 4,000. My quaint little exchange also only caters for 400 businesses, compared to more than 4,000 in the city itself. This of course explains the nature of the predicament, and why so many people in the country still can't get Virgin's cable offering too: money, or more importantly profit.

And it's not as if I live in the middle of nowhere. My flat is on the edge of Cambridge, where I can walk to the city centre in one direction and the Cambridge Science Park, dubbed 'Silicon Fen', in the other. In fact, ironically, the exchange I have is named 'Science Park' after the local landmark it is failing miserably to live up to. I expect the techy units there have super-fast-alien-boosted-NASA broadband. Maybe they'd let me pop onto their Wi-Fi network...