Virgin Media to roll out 200Mbps broadband over next five years

The news agency, Reuters reports that Virgin Media, the major UK cable broadband provider is all set to launch high-speed broadband services that can deliver up to 200Mbps by the year 2012. The cable ISP already offers fibre optic broadband to its customers with its XL package offering up to 20Mbps download speeds.

Howard Watson, the Chief Technology Officer of Virgin Media said in a statement to Reuters that the existing broadband services will be upgraded to enable its customers to get higher speeds in the coming years.

"We are setting ourselves a vision of households using 200 MB per second by 2012. The current technology that we're investing in to roll out the 50 MB per second over the next 12 months has inherent within it that extra capability."

It should be noted that Virgin Media’s main competitor, BT broadband provider has already announced its plans to rollout fibre based broadband network that can offer speeds up to 100 Mbps to the UK households and expects to complete this £1.5bn project in the next five years.

Meanwhile, Virgin Media 50Mbps trial services are already underway in some areas and are expected to hit the broadband market within twelve months from now. The cable ISP has been running the trials to get feedback which is expected to help the ISP to provide better services when the high speed broadband gets launched next year.

Howard Watson has further said:

"If you take a 20 MB customer (on to 50 MB), on day one or two you might see a relatively small increase in usage but by day 60 or 65 they're using 50 MB per second quite easily. (We saw) a lot more video downloading, a lot more online gaming, file sharing and generally a lot more communication with others."