Virgin Media broadband bolts to 100Mb for 10 million homes

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Virgin Media have announced that they now offer super-fast 100Mb broadband speeds to 10 million UK homes. Originally planning to have the service available to half of the UK by the middle of the year, Virgin Media have now revealed they are well ahead of schedule and are on course to finish the roll-out by the Spring.

Virgin Media are currently pledging to double the broadband speed of all its new and existing customers by 2013, with Olympic gold medallist and world’s fastest man used in the advertising campaigns to illustrate the point.

That means that those subscribed to Virgin Media’s L and M services will see their speeds jump from 10Mb to 20Mb, XL customers jumping from 30Mb to 60Mb and XXL customers getting a whopping 100Mb up from their existing 50Mb service. Existing 100Mb subscribers will also see the cost of their subscription drop as a result of the nationwide upgrades.

186,000km of cable and 38,000 street cabinets are getting the upgrade treatment, with the double-speed roll-out hitting different areas at different times.

Virgin Media’s announcement is a timely one. Just last Friday BT announced that they were trialling FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) technology. While it’s quite some way away from being a broadband standard, FTTP offers superb 300Mb speeds.

Gerald Lynch
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