Star's Director of Convergence and Network Strategy, Hugo Harber, said:

"We are excited about Virgin’s plans to offer 100Mbps to half the population by 2012, as naturally we support the widespread adoption of increased bandwidth capacity and availability. However, it is important to note that it is quite easy for Virgin to target the UK’s most populated areas which are closest to their network. As a regulated business, BT has a responsibility to deliver services to a much higher percentage of the population, but the reality is that no business has access to the resources to roll out this kind of broadband speeds to 100% of the population.

Virgin’s move is well above the government’s target of 2Mpbps and we feel the government should be working to improve the level of parity between urban and rural areas. Virgin is effectively widening the digital gap by not being able to deliver better services to the other half of the population not living in major conurbations.

As Cloud services become more prevalent it is important that the UK’s infrastructure can support the delivery of applications, data and telephony which is especially useful for the increasing numbers of home workers."