Virgin Media Business Detail UK £49m Fibre Capacity Deal with Sky Broadband

Cable operator Virgin Media Business has detailed its new £49 million backhaul network capacity deal with BSkyB (Sky Broadband). Under the agreement Virgin will connect around a third of Sky’s unbundled (LLU) local UK telephone exchanges with Sky’s own wholly owned nationwide broadband network.

The five year contract, which was first revealed last month (here), aims to get the new core network work completed by the end of 2013. Each of the new connections is expected to deliver speeds of up to 10Gbps (Gigabits per second) through Virgin’s High Capacity Services product (optical point-to-point links).

Tony Grace, MD of VMB, said:

“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.”

Mohamed Hammady, Director of Sky Network Services, added:

“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.”

No further details were available.