Virgin Media have just inked a deal with Cable & Wireless – former owners of the Bulldog ISP, before it got snaffled by Pipex – which will allow the multimedia giant to roll out its quad play services to over 80% of UK homes via an unbundled ADSL network. This is a significant increase of the former percentage of homes covered by its non-cable broadband network, which hovered somewhere around the 50% mark.

Now, Virgin can market their digital TV set-top box, putting the group on a similar pegging to main TV competitor Sky in terms of the number of customers it can potentially supply with services, however Virgin now have the edge over Sky in terms of Broadband – whilst Sky’s satellite footprint covers nearly all of the UK, the same can’t be said of it’s Broadband network, for the time being at least. Sky have unbundled equipment in over 1,000 phone exchanges since March last year, and show no signs of slowing down.

Recently, Sky have published personal exchanges between boss James Murdoch and his opposite number at Virgin, Steve Burch, in an attempt to embarrass Virgin by claiming that they rejected Sky proposals to resolve the carriage fees dispute. Next week, trade secretary Alastair Darling is set to announce whether to submit Sky’s controversial swoop purchase of a stake ITV should be submitted to the Competition Commission, which could potentially leave ITV open for a Virgin bid.

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