Virgin has stepped up its broadband speed battle with BT by declaring that it will roll out its 100Mbps by the  end of the year.

The company signed up over 63,000 new customers over Christmas and claimed that over a third of the new customers had taken the more expensive 50Mbps service. There will clearly be a demand for  an even faster speed. 

The fiber-based 100 speed network will allow users to download a music album in 5 seconds and a hour long TV show will only take 31 seconds.Virgin has also announced that it will extend the testing of a 200Mbps service to other parts of the UK after initial testing  was announced in May 2009. 

Virgin Media provides broadband, TV,phone and mobile phone services  to around 4 million homes in the UK currently offering services of 10Mbps,20Mbps and 50Mbps. Already some customers are using the 50 Mbps service to its full capacity as some homes use different services such as watching high definition TV and downloading music at the same time.

It seems there is nothing that these new fibre optic cable networks can do and the days of the 2Mbps services are numbered.