Virgin: No market for 150Mbps broadband?

A Virgin Media has said it so far has no plans to offer broadband speeds of 100 to 150Mbps, even though it's capable of doing so before BT completes its fibre network plans.

Virgin Media's chief executive, Neil Berkett, told the BBC News: "If BT were to meet the time frame they have suggested - of finishing by 2012 - I would see us as having much, much faster upstream speed, running at a minimum of 100Mbps downstream and possibly more. You can see a real opportunity there."

A spokesperson from the company said: "We have no plans to launch this at the moment. Mr Berkett was just talking about the capabilities we have for our network, actually it has the capability for speeds of up to 200Mbps, but there is no market for it at present."

BT announced this week that it would be offering super-fast' broadband to a number of UK cities by 2010, with the network being complete by 2012.

BT declined to comment for this story.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.