Virgin Media aiming for 200 Mbps broadband by 2012

Virgin Media's chief executive Neil Berkett started the ball rolling when he said in May that the company would easily be able to deliver 100 Mbps via their cable broadband network by shifting the remaining analogue users over to digital TV:

"Next year, our 20 megabit and 50 megabit customer will move to the DOCSIS 3 platform. This will significantly improve the quality of service provided to all our broadband customers. At the 2-megabit and 10 megabit customers will have more bandwidth specifically dedicated to them. This will help us push real world delivery speeds as close as possible to their advertised headline speed. We currently only use two 8-megahertz channels to serve all our broadband customers. The DOCSIS 3, this will be tripled. Each additional channel will be freed up by switching off a single analog channel. Clearly, it will not be long before we're in a position to switch off analog completely and this will free up significant bandwidth at even higher broadband speeds. We could easily provide 100 megabit per second if we chose to do so. We have a huge broadband advantage over competing technology for speed, quality, reliability, and cost. Within our existing network and analog switch off, it's an advantage we will maintain for many years to come."

Then soon after BT announced it was going to roll out superfast broadband to 40% of UK homes by 2012, Virgin's chief technology officer Howard Watson upped the ante by telling Reuters that:

"We are setting ourselves a vision of households using 200 MB per second by 2012"

Virgin's cable network works in a similar way to FTTC (fibre-to-the-cabinet) — which BT is planning on using to roll out superfast broadband to the vast majority of the 10 million UK homes it's planning on providing coverage to by 2012 — because Virgin's hybrid fibre-coax (HFC) network has fibre optic cable going as far as the local neighbourhoods then the final leg of the journey consists of coaxial cable going into people's homes. Virgin's network therefore has the inherent advantage that the copper wire going into people's homes is inherently able to carry much higher data rates than the thinner telephone wire that BT will be using with FTTC, so BT's FTTC will always be playing catch-up with Virgin's cable broadband.

Virgin Media aiming for 200 Mbps broadband by 2012

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