Virgin Media is gearing up to offer speeds of 400Mbps using overhead cables. They hope that the network will reach another million customers.

Virgin already has 400Mbps- ready modems and routers in the pipeline and Jon James Virgin Media’s Director of Broadband said that 100Mbps will be available by the end of the year.

400Mpbs is fast enough to download an album in almost a second and in around 2 minutes a high definition movie could be downloaded. Mr James says that consumers now want more out of their connections. This will give more capacity to customers and there will be a steady series of upgrades to follow. Cloud computing will be coming to the living room.

Kevin Baughan Director of Technical Strategy at Virgin Media has reportedly said”It would take peoples IT problems away. Homework, photos,films would all live in the cloud and people wouldnt have to worry about the capabilities of their machines.”

It has been discussed for a long time but Virgin are now going to do it.

Virgin Media is planning to roll out broadband via existing overhead cables. They have already tried this in Woolhampton in Berkeshire where they provided residents with speeds of up to 50 Mpbs by building their own poles.

Mr James said that no one can match Virgin Media on speed and that  BT’ Infinity’s 25Mbps average speed is kind of the limit.

BT has denied that there is any great need for speeds to accelerate any time soon although they accept that there will be a demand at some point in the future and they are investing £2.5 billion in faster broadband.