Multimedia giant, Virgin Media, has said that its high speed broadband service is available now and could be taken up by a potential one-third of all businesses and homes across the UK.
Areas where the service can currently be accessed include Lincoln, Birmingham, Seven Kings and Solihull; and Virgin says that it fully intends rolling out the service to more areas in the near future.
The service, which is based on fibre optic cabling technology, and which can, according to Virgin, achieve speeds of 100 Mb, is suitable for a range of sophisticated business communications services, including internet protocol (IP) telephony, and business VoIP (voice over internet protocol).
Whilst proclaiming that the organisation was ‘very proud’ of what it had achieved in the area of high speed broadband provision, Virgin Media also used the announcement as an opportunity to criticise other internet service providers (ISPs) for misleading users with exaggerated claims for broadband speeds.
Jon James, executive director of broadband at Virgin Media, commented on how ‘delivering faster speeds so that consumers can enjoy all the benefits of this rapidly growing connected world is not enough if the industry doesn’t deliver on its marketing claims’.
James’s comments echo strong advice from other industry sources and commentators that when choosing an ISP, businesses need to ensure that the service provided has the capacity to handle all the essential communications requirements of the modern commercial world.
In the case of IP telephony and business VoIP, for example, even where assistance and business phone systems equipment is provided by a reliable host business VoIP provider or VoIP reseller; or even where VoIP enabling technology, such as session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking, is applied to older business phone systems; without sufficient broadband capacity such services may still not be possible.
