Cable giant Virgin Media UK has today reported its latest Q4-2010 financial results, which saw their total broadband ISP subscriber base grow from 4,242,900 to 4,287,000 (+44,100) over the last quarter (that's up from +35,100 in Q3).

The bulk of new broadband additions came from Virgin's strong Cable Modem (DOCSIS, EuroDOCSIS3) platform, which accounts for 4,011,100 of the total (up +41,300). Meanwhile their weaker Virgin National (Virgin.net) ADSL2+ services managed to reverse the recent downward trend by adding +2,800 new customers for a total of 275,900 (up from +1,300 in Q3).

Virgin noted that more than 780,000 (20%) customers now subscribe to their 20Mbps or faster (30Mbps, 50Mbps and 100Mbps) broadband packages, which is up from 708,300 in Q3. It's also noted that some 118,000 customers are on the operator's 50Mbps service, which has grown by 29% since Q3 (91,600).


Virgin claims that the growing demand for its faster broadband services is being driven by the "explosion in data consumption", which is apparently caused by the "burgeoning number of connected devices in the home" and an increase in internet video/TV usage. We suspect that their strong multimedia marketing campaigns also had an impact, as testament by our mailbox being full of related leaflet SPAM.

Apparently the operator now carries over half a terabit of data per second (0.5Tbps) during busy (peak) periods. At that rate it is possible to download 62 copies of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica every second, not that you'd want to do that.

Virgin Media also noted that they were "making good progress" with the deployment of their faster upload speeds (original announcement). However no firm timescale was offered. Likewise there was little information about the uptake of Virgin's new 100Mbps service (details), primarily because it was launched towards the end of Q4.

As a side note, Virgin Media are still known to be conducting trials of 200Mbps broadband speeds in selected homes and faster upload performance of 20Mbps is also being tested. However some predicts suggests that their 200Mbps speed service probably wouldn't be ready until the end of 2012 and will be dependent upon demand.