Britain’s rail companies must sympathise with the position of its broadband suppliers. Both are struggling to meet public expectations of faster, cheaper and more reliable services while pouring money into Victorian networks.

Virgin Media’s 50Mbps broadband package is the Eurostar of internet deals, serving select areas with dedicated high-speed lines while the rest of the country makes the best of outdated technology.

Unlike most ISPs, which try to coax high-speed internet connections out of copper telephone lines, Virgin uses fibre-optic cables, which are better suited to broadband. Copper wires don’t cope well with high-speed data to begin with, and the signal loses strength as it passes through the wire.

With copper wires, only the people living closest to their telephone exchange can expect to get anywhere near the theoretical maximum of about 8Mbps. The further away you are – and in rural areas a single exchange may cover a huge geographical area – the slower your broadband will be.

Fibre-optic cables don’t suffer from the same loss of signal, so connection speeds should be unaffected by the household’s distance from an exchange. That does not, however, mean that a 50Mbps broadband package will provide a constant speed of 50Mbps.

Virgin has one of the most stringent “fair use” policies – the guidelines that ISPs say are necessary to protect the networks from abuse by their most bandwidth-hungry users. Every day between 4pm and 9pm, Virgin cuts the connection speed of 5 per cent of its users by 75 percent, so that someone with a 20Mbps broadband package will be getting only 5Mbps, close to the average speed in London.

This practice, known as throttling, is designed to target people who swap large amounts of music and video illegally using file-sharing applications such as Bittorrent, but it also often catches legitimate data-hungry users such as online gamers and web video enthusiasts.

These are exactly the people who will be attracted to Virgin’s superfast service. Providing them with the service they sign up for while protecting the network from abuse could prove difficult.

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