British cable group Virgin Media plans to offer broadband speeds of up to 200 megabits per second by 2012 to deliver online video downloading and interactive gaming, its chief technology officer said. The average UK broadband download speed is currently around 4 MB per second according to media regulator Ofcom.
Howard Watson told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday that Virgin Media was currently investing in technologies that would free up capacity on its network to allow faster broadband speeds as demand builds.
The speeds would allow families to enjoy interactive gaming, the downloading of online video including high-definition TV, and teleconferencing in multiple rooms of a house at the same time.
"We are setting ourselves a vision of households using 200 MB per second by 2012," he said. "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."
Broadband speeds have become increasingly important in Britain, due to the popularity of online video sites such as YouTube and the BBC's catch-up service the iPlayer.
But some have questioned whether there is enough demand for such services and an announcement by telecoms group BT that it was building a high-speed network was met by some questions of whether it was "investing into the unknown". BT has said it will spend 1.5 billion pounds to deliver speeds of up to 100MB by 2012.
Virgin Media will roll out broadband speeds of up to 50 MB by the middle of next year and is heavily marketing what it believes will be a strong advantage over its rivals, which use the slower copper-based networks. Watson said the group had already run 50 MB trials with between 300 and 400 customers and had seen a significant change in their habits.
"If you take a 20 MB customer (on to 50 MB), 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," he said.
"(We saw) a lot more video downloading, a lot more online gaming, file sharing and generally a lot more communication with others." Watson said the group could provide faster speeds by freeing up capacity by moving its remaining analogue TV customers on to more efficient digital platforms by the end of 2009.
"It is capacity that we have in the network that is reasonably easy to get at, and then (we need to) re-purpose that capacity for more broadband," he said.
Virgin Media's drive to promote its broadband has caught the attention of some rivals including BT which recently suggested Virgin Media should be forced to open up its network and wholesale to other competitors.
But Watson said it was too early for such demands. "We are trying to build a market here for high speed broadband, that market doesn't exist yet in the UK and it's too early to be looking at over-regulation or wholesaling in that context."