Virgin Media’s response to BT Fibre plan

BT’s plans to connect 40 per cent of UK homes with next-gen fibre optic services by 2012 have prompted this response from Virgin Media, who are currently the sole providers of residential fibre optic broadband services.

James Kydd, Virgin’s MD of Marketing and Brand last week had this to say about the BT’s big announcement:

“We’ve long believed that super-fast broadband is what people want and we’re not surprised some of our competitors are now trying to play catch up. We’ve already invested £13 billion in a fibre-optic network and the launch of our 50Mb product later this year will mean 12 million UK consumers won’t have to wait to get access to next generation broadband.

Our 50Mb trialists have already experienced the power of superfast broadband and we’re excited that we will soon be able to offer this to millions of UK homes.” Virgin Media are also reportedly investing in DOCSIS3.0 technology which would theoretically allow them to provide downstream speeds of over 300Mbps.

ADSL2+ speed kings O2 Broadband have also announced plans to pipe fibre to UK homes, should Ofcom guarantee that networks are not opened up under any kind of Openreach/LLU program. “We need clear and unambiguous regulation in place before we start shelling out huge sums of money,” said O2′s spokesperson last week.

1 Comment »Posted by Tom on July 22nd 2008 in BT Broadband, Next Gen Broadband, O2 Broadband, Virgin Media

Similar Posts:

• Be Broadband to bring own fibre to the table
• BT to double pace of fibre optic broadband rollout
• Virgin Media to add 500,000 homes to cable network
• Virgin Media’s plans to do a BT with its fibre network
• High speed broadband to reach 4m households by 2012

One Response to “Virgin Media’s response to BT Fibre plan”

1. mark turnbull said on 29 Jul 2009 at 8:13 pm #

   75% of the 40% of the people to get fiber-optic installation will be either in London area or Glasgow and surrounding areas. Smaller towns will be bypassed due to costs. I was told by BT that I would have fiber-optic by 2008 but then was told that there is not enough people in my area to cover the cost of installation. This is why I got Sky 12meg broadband due to it being faster than BT and they still bug me to get their 8 meg broadband. Sky have released that they will uping their speed to between 16 and 18 meg, while Bt have no planns to increase their broadband speeds. I know who I’m stopping with

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