Cable giant Virgin Media has announced that the rollout of its "ultrafast fibre optic" 100Mbps broadband service will complete ahead of schedule in Spring 2012 (instead of mid-2012 as originally planned). The service, which was launched at the end of 2010, is already available to 10 million homes across the UK (13 million is the goal).

Furthermore Virgin Media claims that the growing take up and use of connected devices has caused an explosion in the volume of online data. In fact the operator now carries twice as much data as two years ago. During peak periods internet traffic on Virgin Media's network now exceeds over three quarters of a terabit per second.


Virgin Media recently announced a major £110m upgrade that would at least double the broadband speeds for its cable customers. The one exception was Virgin's latest 100Mbps package, which will instead be increased to 120Mbps. A future 200Mbps service is still under trial but could be officially announced before the end of this year.