Virgin unveils 'world's fastest' cable broadband

Claims that super-fast broadband could change lives or even spark a second industrial revolution are not exaggerated.

No Hollywood movie has ever set its vision of the future near London’s Old Street roundabout. Yet right there, at business centre TechHub, Virgin Media has demonstrated the world’s fastest cable broadband. Where Britain’s average speeds are around 6mbps, this runs at 250 times that: 1.5gbps.

These numbers, however, are about more than figures: it is infrastructure such as this that has real potential to make a profound difference to real people’s lives and businesses.

Ed Vaizey, the Communications Minister, welcomed Virgin’s trial, and said “the Prime Minister set out our ambition for London’s East End to become a world-leading technology city to rival Silicon Valley. Developments like Virgin Media’s will help make this ambition a reality.”

He might just be right: with the fastest broadband speeds, it’s hard to predict quite what this level could mean. Indeed, sources close to a major broadband provider privately express concerns about justifying such experiments because, as they put it, “We have to have faith; there is an element of build it and they will come with this sort of thing”.

What it is certainly possible to say with certainty, however, is that 1.5gbps puts the problems of today well behind us. If a family with ten computers wants to stream different high-definition, 3D movies to each device, they could. Business users would have no qualms either. In such exciting endeavours there is, as Mr Vaizey says, the prospect of attracting “new companies and entrepreneurs to the area, bringing new jobs and growth”.

The real power of such speeds, however, is in more than home entertainment, despite the industry's force as a major employer. Improved broadband services, as the medical director of the NHS, Sir Bruce Keogh, recently pointed out, enable doctors to see patients remotely with a level of detail that really does allow some specialists to use services massively more efficient, either through eliminating travel costs or by bringing very sophisticated techniques to remote locations.

In the background, however, is Britain’s struggling rural broadband network. Yet in Hull local provider KC Communications is wiring 15,000 homes up to its own superfast fibre network. The economics are tough, but it demonstrates, in the words of KC Chief Executive Kevin Walsh “we’ll be able to meet the needs of the most bandwidth-hungry households today and in the future”. Those demands will not all come from teenagers playing videogames.

There are, of course, some sceptics: envisaging a different NHS is a real challenge. Envisaging businesses that don’t yet exist is harder still, especially without watching Star Trek. But as No 10’s adviser Tim Kelsey said recently, even school reports are set to go online: experimental new trials are aimed at inspiring new approaches to existing problems. No wonder some commentators raise the prospect of a second industrial revolution.

Source: The Telegraph