Virgin Expands 100Mbps Broadband Service

Virgin Media has named five more areas of the UK that have been upgraded to receive its superfast 100Mbps broadband service.

Virgin Media first announced the high-end service back in February last year before officially launching it in December. The company has also demonstrated 200Mbps broadband.

The lucky areas to be upgraded to 100Mbps include two towns in Hertfordshire, namely Cheshunt and Hatfield, the Pentwyn district in Cardiff, Wales, and the seaside town of Southport, near Merseyside.

100Mbps Welsh Village

But perhaps more surprising is the fifth location, Treforest, which is a remote village in the south-east of Pontypridd in the county borough of Rhondda Cynon Taf (Wales).

“We are rolling out the 100Mbps to all of our network across the UK, which should see this service reach half of all UK homes by 2012,” a Virgin Media spokesperson explained to eWEEK Europe UK. “This 100Mbps broadband will be available from £35 per month (plus line rental) for users.”

Customers can enter their postcode here, to see if they can receive the 100Mbps service.

“We have been conducting a number of trials in an effort to look at ways to expand our network into more remote areas,” said the Virgin Media spokesperson, citing the company’s fibre over telegraph poles for the Berkshire village of Woolhampton, as well as fibre over electricity poles trials for the Welsh village of Crumlin, Caerphilly.

“But it makes sense to upgrade all our network, across our footprint. We already had a presence and customers in Treforest,” said the spokesperson, although she could not provide a breakdown of the exact numbers of Virgin Media customers in that area.

However a simpler explanation could be from the fact that the University of Glamorgan has a student campus located in Trefforest.

Broadband Issues

The rollout of Virgin Media’s 100Mbps service constrasts starkly with the slow broadband line speeds in other parts of the UK.

Last July the coalition government delayed the national roll out of a miserly 2Mbps broadband line speed to all British homes until 2015.

BT has already announced plans for its own high-end broadband service capable of speeds of up to 110Mbps, in March 2011.

The UK carrier continues to rollout fibre across the United Kingdom, and has recently announced the winners of its ‘Race to Infinity’ competition, where customers competed for a fibre broadband rollout in their part of the country.