‘Virgin Media’ customers to benefit from higher speed broadband service

‘Virgin Media’ claims to provide broadband to 13 million UK homes well ahead of schedule. The service provider, whose financial report for the previous year is expected to be announced on Wednesday, informed that it is set to cater  broadband to 10 million out of the 26 million homes in the UK. Virgin Media, the only UK cable company, is expected to gain a small net profit. The profit is likely to range from GBP 60 to 78 million. Virgin Media is in tug of war with BT for providing broadband to the UK homes. Virgin Media has the target of increasing the download speeds of from 50 Mbps to 120 Mbps by the summer. BT also intends to increase the speeds from 40 Mbps to 80 Mbps during the same period. With higher speeds, the customers can surf the net, play online games, watch television etc simultaneously using smartphones, tablets and PC. The UK is not even among the first 30 nations as far as download speeds are concerned, but Virgin Media is determined to bring the country among the top 20 nations and ahead of US, Japan, France, Germany etc. According to JP Morgon Cazenovia, the TV and telecom group of the company increased its customer base by 13,000 to 4.8 million in the final quarter, inclusive of the 30,000 broadband subscribers. During the same period 146,000 new broadband customers were enrolled by BT. BT and Virgin Media are the only providers with fiber broadband service and expect customers to prefer them rather than BSkyB Sky and TalkTalk, which are still continuing with copper lines, installing their equipment for the telephone exchanges, spending lot of money, but copper lines cannot provide large speeds. However, Sky is planning to utilize fiber from BT for rent, and is already taking up the trials of high speed broadband.