Virgin Media Business To Link Together Sky’s Fibre Networks

A third of Sky’s unbundled local exchanges will be linked to the rest of its broadband infrastructure through the network owned by Virgin Media Business (VMB), as a result of a deal worth £49 million agreed today.

The five year contract will see the core of the network in place by the end of this year, delivering more capacity.

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Under the agreement, exchanges owned by BskyB will be connected through VMB’s High Capacity Services enterprise network, which offers speeds up to 10 Gbps.

“As we see traffic on our network grow significantly year-on-year, this agreement provides us with the capacity we need to keep innovating for customers and as such are committed to maintaining our high-capacity network,” commented Mohamed Hammady, director of Sky Network Services at BskyB.

Carrying Sky’s traffic will not interfere with Virgin’s consumer network. The deal is expected to benefit both companies: VMB will get an additional stream of revenue to pay for its technologically advanced network, while BskyB will get a capacity boost without spending hundreds of millions of pounds on laying new fibre.

“High capacity connectivity is vital in today’s digitally driven world. Whilst we’re concentrating on developing better services for the public in our consumer division, we also believe that our high capacity network is ideally placed to provide the underlying infrastructure that can help other providers with their backhaul capacity needs,” said Tony Grace, managing director of Virgin Media Business.

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