Virgin Media Upgrades Network Bandwidth for 2,084 London Schools

Cable operator Virgin Media Business (Liberty Global) has reportedly completed an upgrade of their existing coaxial and fibre optic based Public Sector Network (PSN) in London, which means that around 2,084 local Schools can now benefit from faster Internet speeds.

According to the London Grid for Learning (LGfL), some 1,700 of the schools have seen a total bandwidth uplift to date of over 115Gpbs (Gigabits per second) via the LGfL2.0 School Bandwidth Upgrade project.

For example, the Friern Barnet School in North London has very recently been upgraded to support speeds of 200Mbps (Megabits per second).

John Jackson, CEO of LGfL, said (Government Computing):

“[This] cements our position as one of the leading education networks in the world. What we’ve done is to make the next generation of digital learning and wider service transformation possible.

At London Grid for Learning, we provide digital cloud based services for over a million children, 250,000 teachers and 750,000 plus public sector workers. We’ve been working together to upgrade more than 2000 schools in London – to build and improve one of the largest educational networks in the world.

What’s really exciting about this is that this network can help us ensure that children get the best start in life and that teachers can really use innovative practices to make the classroom exciting and different for the future.

And at this time when there are lots of Brexit blues, we should remember this: we’ve delivered in London one of the most innovative transformational projects in the world. And we’ve done it fantastically well. And I want to say a huge thank you to Virgin Media on behalf of the children in London, and on behalf of their teachers.”

Virgin has been responsible for building and maintaining the LondonPSN for the past 5 years and the original network was already rated to deliver data speeds of between 10Mbps and 10Gbps, as well as supporting various other features like WiFi and VoIP etc. Mind you it’s also had to deal with a few controversies along the way (example).