Virgin Media is turning the old information highway into a super highway

Broadband users across the United Kingdom are looking forward to the day when giant electronic files are delivered at lightning speed to their desktops, video over the Internet arrives quickly and smoothly, and video games react instantly. All at the same time. And the telecommunications companies, eager to provide a hungry market with what it wants, are racing to make it happen.

Virgin Media—the British television, broadband, and mobile and fixed-line telephone giant—has a head start. Its nearly ten million U.K. customers are already using an average of 70% more bandwidth per month than in 2007. In addition, the company's stake in 16 entertainment TV channels and leading Video on Demand TV service, spells the opportunity to exploit a bevy of potential synergies.

There's been one big hurdle. Electronic content has advanced so rapidly that the current infrastructure needs a bold upgrade in order to meet user demand for more bandwidth. As things now stand, customers do have the ability to download movies. Not all jump at the opportunity, however, because the process can sometimes take hours to complete.

All this adds up to a large challenge. While other Telecom and internet firms are only now just thinking about whether they can afford to invest fortunes to lay thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, Virgin Media has already done so. And while the company is the only one in the UK that has a fibre-optic network, the idea of tearing it up is still not a happy one. Fortunately for Virgin Media and its customers, upgrading broadband capacity is as easy as plugging in a turbocharger. This became clear in April, when the company teamed up with Nortel and Juniper Networks to test a plan to quadruple network capacity for Virgin Media customers between Manchester and London. Juniper fired up its routers. Nortel followed by installing a 40-gigabit-per-second (40G) wavelength translator at each end of the corridor. Result: During the trial, what had been the old information highway was turned into a super highway.

Virgin Media executives like the implications. "It means we don't have to worry about the amount of capacity we have in the core network," says Howard Watson, the company's chief technology officer. "With 40G cards, we have the capability to build capacity into the heart of our network in an incremental way without having to make a significant infrastructure investment."

A turbocharged infrastructure is opening new horizons for Virgin Media. This year, the company will launch a new customer package delivering 50 megabits per second, more than twice as fast as Virgin Media's highest speed package today. This means the company will be able to satisfy the appetites of its most voracious consumers even if, as Watson says, "many people in a household—parents and children—are actually using broadband at the same time."

"It will enable Virgin Media to offer new services around accessing and distributing larger files," says Ian Rathmell, business development manager for Nortel. "Everything they're providing will be that much quicker, so they'll be more competitive because they'll be even more faster than the competition."

With Nortel's innovative 40G approach to enhancing capacity, Virgin Media has found a solution that's as elegant as it is affordable. That's because adding Nortel 40G involves minimal tinkering with the underlying, Nortel-supplied equipment. By contrast, says Rathmell, when Nortel competitors reach for 40G, they rely on more complicated techniques that increase the likelihood of technical breakdowns. To make things even better, 40G isn't the limit—not by any stretch. Nortel is already developing a 100G solution, which would mean juicing up today's broadband capacity by a multiple of ten.

Where the bandwidth race will end is anybody's guess. But thanks to an adaptable system, Virgin Media can worry about other things—such as what new product upgrades and improvements it can offer its customers.