As well as taking home two gold medals for his record-breaking 100m and 200m sprint in the current Beijing Olympics, Jamaican runner Usain Bolt will be looking forward to a pretty packet as Virgin Media have snapped him up for their latest ad campaign.

The world’s fastest man, Bolt is to become the face of Virgin Media’s superfast broadband service. The company, which is due to launch an ultra-fast 50Mbps broadband service which it claims is almost double the speed of those of rival ISPs, are considering calling the new product “Boltband”.

Ashley Stockwell, head of Virgin Media’s marketing operation said “Our new 50Mb service will deliver even faster lightning broadband speeds, which is why we feel that Usain will be the perfect ambassador for our campaign.”

After his amazing 100m victory, Bolt, aged 22, went on to smash the 200m world record yesterday in a nail-biting race that saw the second and third-place runners disqualified. He made the sprint in just 19.30 seconds, 0.02 seconds faster than the American Michael Johnson’s word record that had stood since the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

Virgin Media has used a number of celebrities in the past to promote its products and services. Kill Bill actress Uma Thurman fronted its £20 million campaign to rebrand NTL as Virgin Media, while Samuel L. Jackson and Ruby Wax have also appeared in adverts for the company.

A study by the telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has found that the copper wiring network currently used in the UK could deliver speeds of up to 50Mbps if exploited to its full potential. In an investigation into Britain’s current broadband network, Ofcom wanted to test whether it would be capable of delivering the higher speeds that ISP customers are demanding.

In theory, copper wires could still achieve speeds of up to 50Mbps if an upstream modem is hosted in the exchange. However, in practice actual speeds would probably be far lower, as the quality of copper wiring varies considerably between households.

The latest findings could throw a spanner in the works when it comes to BT’s grand plan, announced in July of this year, to install a £1.5 billion fibre-optic network across the UK, if the telecoms company agrees with the findings. Virgin has also expressed interest in investing in the network. A number in the industry fear that Ofcom’s findings could severely delay investment in a fibre-optic network, meaning that Britain would lag behind the rest of Europe, and certainly Asia, when it comes to ultra high-speed broadband.

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Orange are understood to be ready to launch their long-awaited IPTV (TV via broadband) service, after having taken its trials for its digital TV service to the whole country. Launch was supposed to be something in ‘late 2007′, which obviously didn’t happen, and the launch was moved back to an indeterminate time – trials are apparently still ongoing, but it is understood that the service will be ready to launch very soon.

At the time, Orange said that: “The first phase - our trial to existing paying broadband customers - started in November. Around 300 customers in Leeds and London are currently providing us with essential feedback. Once we’ve reviewed and assessed this feedback, we’ll then continue to roll out to other major towns and cities in the New Year.”

Orange has managed to secure a deal with MGM which will allow them to supply movies on demand to France, Spain and Poland as well as the UK. Orange will also be rolling with Rewind TV, a catch up service which allows you to watch the last months’ worth of programmes on demand - check out the clip uploaded to YouTube.

This could really help Orange’s IPTV offering stand out from the crowd, as the Virgin Media and BT Vision catch up services by contrast allow you to watch the last week’s worth of programmes. By effectively quadrupling the amount of TV you can watch, Orange have already increased the added value of their digital TV service four fold. We said last December that 2008 was set to be the year of IPTV. This could be interesting…

Keeping in line with yesterday’s post concerning the healthy state of the UK broadband market, in sharp contrast to that of the housing market, Virgin Media have announced some healthy profits, no doubt due to their marketing emphasis on their cable broadband services; some 54,000 broadband subscriptions were added in the last quarter, bringing the total Virgin Media broadband consumer base (including cable and ADSL) to a cool 3,836,100. Underlying profits for the quarter are reportedly something in the region of £333m.

This precipitates the unveiling of the hotly anticipated unveiling of 50Mbps speeds, apparently due sooner than people might think. Virgin Media’s Neil Berkett had this to say: “The second half of this year will mark a major milestone as we roll out our unrivalled 50Mb broadband service. We believe this superfast service, combined with our leading video-on-demand product, will prove extremely attractive to existing and new customers.”

Talks with Sky are apparently still happening, but nothing new is happening on that front, so don’t hold your breath.

Virgin Media have revealed that it plans to offer ‘up to’ speeds of 200Mbps to UK customers by 2012, according to an interview with news agency Reuters. Virgin chief technology officer Howard Watson has revealed that the fibre providers plan to beat BT’s £1.5 billion broadband offering by double by the time the Olympics arrive in London:

“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,” Watson said, before saying how customer usage shifts dramatically once they realise they have some new bandwidth to play with:

“If you take a 20Mb customer [and upgrade them to 50Mb] 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.”

Virgin haven’t mentioned anything as of yet about how much money they’re planning on putting into the pot to funds this, or how many UK homes would be able to get the super fast 200Mbps speeds, although an independent source tells us Virgin Media can only hope to get top speeds of 160Mbps out of their current network as it is, so it would seem that Virgin are going to have to start digging up the roads along with BT if this next-gen vision is to be a reality.

The six biggest ISPs in the UK have struck a deal with the government and the BPI to clamp down on illegal filesharing. The ‘Memorandum of Understanding’, or MoU, comes ahead of an announcement to be issued by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform later today, threatening ISPs with prosecution if they fail to tackle unlawful downloading of music and videos.

“We have looked to ISPs to acknowledge their responsibility to help deal with illegal file-sharing, engage in communicating the issue to their customers, and put in place procedures necessary to effectively tackle repeated unlawful file-sharing,” said a spokesperson for the BPI, the body that represents the British recorded music business.

Unsurprisingly, the list includes both BT and Virgin Media who have both already threatened to get medieval on errant customers. The four other signatories include Orange, Tiscali and Sky and the Carphone Warehouse - we were surprised to see that Charles Dunstone’s group had signed up, given that they had in the past told the BPI where to shove it with regard to adopting a three-strikes rule.

The new agreement sees ISPs adopting universal measures to deal with repeat offenders as well as a plan to commit to the development of more legal music download sites. The deal will involve providers sending warning letters to thousands of illegal downloaders telling them that their activities are being monitored and that they could face prosecution if they continue to flout the law. The crackdown is being hailed by the government as the “world’s first solution” agreed by the industry to tackle illegal file-sharing; it is estimated that last year alone around 6.5 million people in Britain downloaded files illegally.

Parents who receive the letters will be in for a shock, since many are unaware that their children have been downloading music, films and TV programmes illegally. They could be blacklisted and have their internet use curbed under the new plans. Households that ignore the warning letters could have their download speeds massively reduced, making it harder and more time-consuming to download large files, or even be blocked from using the internet altogether.

Concerns raised by this ruling include the prospect of subscribers having their wireless connections hacked and used by someone else for illegal downloads - under current proposals, this could see customers who are victims of pharming being held accountable for the illegal actions of others.

Tiscali have begun legal proceedings against BT, after it was revealed this week that the UK’s leading internet service provider had mailed letters, containing “defamation and malicious falsehood” to Tiscali customers.

The letters, sent in the wake of the announcement earlier this year that Tiscali - currently the fourth biggest ISP in the UK - was searching for a buyer, cast doubts on the company’s future and advised customers to switch to a provider with a more stable long-term prospects, i.e. BT.

“We can understand why you’re wondering what might happen to your Tiscali broadband service,” the letters said. “And because no one really knows the answer just yet, it could be a good time to look for an alternative broadband service.”

BT have defended their actions saying that sending the letters to Tiscali customers was legitimate business practice: “Following media reports suggesting that Tiscali was up for sale we recently approached a number of Tiscali customers, and pointed out the benefits of our service. We believe this is a legitimate and reasonable business practice - comparative marketing is an important aspect of a competitive market.” Many are suspicious as to how BT obtained Tiscali’s customer information in the first place but BT insisted that it used “reputable external sources.”

The move by BT is just another example of the cut-throat nature of the consolidating UK comms market as ISPs try desperately to attract new customers and the top dogs try to stay on top. Arash Amel, an analyst with research group Screen Digest believes that as competition becomes tougher, only ISPs backed by big businesses such as Sky and Virgin Media can hope to survive in the long-term: “The standalone ISP business model is looking increasingly shaky… For every gigabyte of data customers use the bigger the costs for ISPs and their small profits start to disappear.”

Indeed; Tiscali last year bought Pipex, who had previously purchased Bulldog and Toucan - this swelled Tiscali’s total broadband consumer base to around 1.9 million. Vodafone, the world’s biggest mobile phone network, was once touted as a possible buyer for Tiscali’s broadband services, which would have meant for further market consolidation, but negotiations reportedly dissolved at the last minute.

Readers ought to remember that though people seem to get all misty eyed when they think of Tokyo and Seoul and their 100Mbps speeds, the reality of the situation is that your average Japanese or Korean user enjoys downstream speeds of 40Mbps, which is what we should sensibly hope to expect when BT begin pumping fibre to the homes of 10 million UK residents over the next three and a half years.

Bearing this in mind, BT’s fibre plan has, somewhat predictably, been criticised for being obsolete out of the box. It is believed that by 2012, when rollout of the £1.5bn network is due to be completed, Tokyo, Seoul and Paris will each have ploughed more cash into their broadband infrastructures, suggesting that us in the UK will carry on playing catch-up with the rest of the world in terms of download speeds.

“This announcement will not take us ahead of Korea or Japan,” a BT spokesman conceded today, but “over the next few years, it will enable some very high speeds, as high as anywhere else.” In an open letter to the Financial Times, IT researchers at TNS Technology said that “the UK will remain a second-tier country when it comes to internet speeds.”

That said, it’s worth considering that BT have whispered that once laid, their cable network will be able to pump out even faster speeds provided the requisite upgrades in the future are made. Consider that the comparatively old cable networks of NTL and Telewest inherited by Virgin Media will soon be kicking out top download speeds approaching 50Mbps, and that Virgin are apparently planning on introducing 300Mbps downstream speeds in the not too distant future.

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.

Figures newly released by Virgin Media record more than 10million viewings on the BBC iPlayer through their own cable TV service last month.

As many people watched iPlayer programmes via Virgin Media as through the BBC iPlayer website in June, when the service was first made available to cable TV customers. 3.5million Virgin Media subscribers have access to the iPlayer service, allowing them to catch up on over 350 hours of BBC programmes each week. The TV version of the iPlayer can be accessed via the ‘red button’ on Virgin Media’s cable service.

Altogether the iPlayer, which has been running a full service since December last year, attracts an average 1.5 million viewers a week. The most popular programmes to be viewed via the iPlayer last month included Eastenders, Holby City, The Apprentice and Friday Night with Jonathan Ross.

Virgin Media’s CEO, Malcolm Wall, said that the high viewing figures were testament to the “continued success of our on-demand offering.” BBC Contoller for TV platforms Rahul Chakkara said that the immediate success of the flagship catch-up service on Virgin Media “underlines the multiplatform appeal of the BBC iPlayer proposition.”