Virgin launches unlimited bandwidth for business


29 Sep 2010

British cable operator Virgin Media will offer business customers unlimited bandwidth, responding to frustrations over slow and disrupted connections.

Virgin said it had developed this offering after a survey with IT professionals said that restrictions on internet access damaged their output.

The plan will see Virgin offer a service called ‘the Big Red Internet’ that give businesses all the bandwidth they want without network upgrades or extra charges.

It will offer a 100 MB/s service for small businesses and a 1GB/s service for medium-sized organisations.

Virgin Media’s business unit covers 1,500 corporate customers. Mark Heraghty, managing director for this sector, told Reuters that their fibre network could reach 85pc of all British businesses and said it would give them access to the entire network.

Virgin Media is largely consumer-based and Heraghty said this meant the network was largely unused during the day.

It also suits Virgin’s plan to make the business unit a core element of their services.

“We have a large, under-utilised asset with great capacity which not enough people know about,” said Heraghty.