Followed by Citigroup’s forecast, the financial results released by Virgin for the three months ended on 30, September, 2007 show the cable broadband provider now has 3.3 million customers connected by cable and 0.3 million customers by ADSL. Virgin touched this figure as 115,800 new cable broadband connections were established during this quarter compared to 45,800 new additions in the second quarter. This makes Virgin Media, the largest ISP in the UK in terms of home broadband connections. Currently, more than 90 percent of Virgin Media customers are offered cable based broadband while rest of them get broadband service by its ADSL division who is reported to have 282,300 connections by the end of third quarter of this year.

As far as revenues of this quarter are concerned, the home broadband service delivered via Virgin’s cable network shows a marginal decline from £619.3 million to £607.7 million during the quarter, however, the revenues from business broadband division was up by £4.2 million. Virgin The highlight of the financial report was that Mobile’s revenues of the quarter were up by nearly 10 percent to £ 158.7 million.

Currently, Virgin Media is keen on upgrading its packages to deliver high speed broadband  and challenging its ADSL counterparts like BT, UK Online and Be. Virgin Media XL size package has been upgraded from 10 Mbps speed and currently it offers 20 Mbps download speed. Virgin has also started launching its 50 Mbps trial services in selected areas in the UK. The report further says that the cable giant has been studying the option of implementing new broadband standards like DOCSIS 3.0 as it has plans to increase the broadband speeds further for its services in the next two years.

The Acting CEO of Virgin Media Neil Berkett commented:
“Our third quarter results show a significant turnaround in customer and RGU growth with our best customer, broadband and telephony growth since the cable merger in March 2006.
With the cable merger integration expected to be complete by year end, we can focus on continuing to improve the fundamentals, enhancing our products, reducing our churn, and delivering on our competitive strengths.”

In UK, the strength of cable broadband is the inclusion of digital TV channels with the broadband package. These triple play packages and sometimes quadruple play packages are ideal for familes whose all needs - whether broadband needs or entertainment needs - are better met out by the cable broadband packages than ADSL packages. Moreover, ADSL providers like BT, Tiscali are also providing IPTV services which create turbulence among many customers due to fears of online traffic congestion. However, Virgin Media says its cable network does not have such problems and can deliver three times higher speed when compared with DSL providers. It is yet to be seen how far Virgin's claims are going to be true as we have seen a great difference between the advertised speed and the actual speed that one gets.