Virgin to Expand to 400 Mbps Broadband

Virgin is currently the only cable provider in the UK, and also the only provider to be able to offer a huge 50 Mbps to residential customers. Its 50 Mbps service has so far existed at a fair price and without any usage caps at all, but is only available to a relatively small section of the nation. In fact, only about 50% of the country can access cable services at any speed at all.

However, that hasn?t stopped Virgin Media from announcing plans to launch a 100 Mbps package before Christmas and beginning trails for 200 Mbps in some areas, ready to be released to the public within a couple of years. Those speeds are pretty impressive when you consider the average speed in the country is only about 4.6 Mbps, and even the planned next gen BT rollout is likely to only see speeds between 40 Mbps ? 60 Mbps available to residential customers.

Now Virgin have even hinted that they plan to expand even beyond 200 Mbps and are looking at developing the technology to speeds of up to 400 Mbps; 100 times faster than the countries average speed.

Executive Direct of Virgin Media, Jon James explained Virgin?s ideas in an interview with TechRadar:

?We are also doing 100Mbps ? launching in Q4 this year ? we are trialling 200Mbps but that’s a very commercial trial in the sense of working out in the real life what you can do with 200 Mbps.

We know very well we can do 200Mbps and we could do 400Mbps. We are launching a new modem by the end of the year that will be 400Mbps capable. And that’s a vehicle for the evolution of our speed portfolio in the next two years?

Even more exciting for those outside the reach of a cabled area, Virgin have suggested that they could reach an extra million homes without needing a subsidy which could mean a big portion of those previously stuck with DSL as the only option could see the ability to get massive speed gains.

Do you really need 400 Mbps or even 200 Mbps internet? Right now, probably not. But just as Dial-up now seems incredibly outdated and most sites have given up even trying to work properly with dial-up speeds, one day we?ll look back at speed of 10 Mpbs and 20 Mbps and wonder how we ever managed to use the internet at those speeds.

Meanwhile 50+ Mbps services are likely to appeal to people who do a lot of download, or large families that would like to stream multiple HD channels at once of their connection without slowdown.

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