Broadband News
Virgin Media - 200Mb by 2012
Monday, 28 July 2008
By Garnet Roach garnet@consumerchoices.co.uk
Cable provider Virgin Media has revealed that it plans to offer shockingly fast broadband speeds of up to 200Mb by 2012.
“We are setting ourselves a vision of households using 200Mb per second by 2012,” Howard Watson, the provider’s chief technology officer, told Reuters news agency. “The current technology that we’re investing in to roll out the 50Mb per second over the next 12 months has inherent within it that extra capability.”
To do this, Virgin Media (www.VirginMedia.com) will need to free up more network capacity to cope with the far higher usage habits that consumers will develop using such a fast connection.
As well as improving technology to make its network more efficient, Virgin Media said that it will free capacity by switching off its old analogue television signal and moving those remaining customers to digital by the end of 2009.
Michael Phillips, BroadbandChoices.co.uk product director, said: “BT (www.BT.com) recently announced plans to invest £1.5 billion in a fibre optic network that would deliver speeds of up to 100Mb over the same timeframe.
“Virgin Media’s announcement will definitely heat up competition in the super-fast broadband market.”
And if you’re wondering what you might possibly do with so much bandwidth, Watson explained that user habits quickly change once people have the capacity to really take the internet to the next level.
“If you take a 20Mb customer (onto 50Mb), on day one or two you might see a relatively small increase in usage but by day 60 or 65 they’re using 50Mb per second quite easily,” he said. “(We saw) a lot more video downloading, a lot more online gaming, file sharing and generally a lot more communication with others.”
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