BSkyB inks £49m deal with Virgin Media Business to overhaul its network infrastructure across the UK

BSkyB should see the capacity for its core network skyrocket in the next few years, thanks to a new £49 million ($73.6 million USD) deal inked today with Virgin Media.

The new five-year contract with Virgin Media Business, the corporate arm of Virgin Media, will be used to overhaul BSkyB’s core network capacity across Great Britain. Virgin operates the UK’s only nationwide fibre optic network and currently carries roughly 35 percent of all business-related broadband traffic across the region.

The company will be using this network to connect around a third of Sky’s unbundled local exchanges with Sky’s own wholly-owned nationwide broadband network.

Five years might sound like an awful long time, but Virgin Media Business claims it will have the revamped network up and running before the end of this year. The new connections between Sky’s local exchanges and nationwide broadband network should be able to deliver speeds of up to 10 Gbps, courtesy of Virgin Media’a High Capacity Services product.

Which is pretty darn fast, by anyone’s standards.

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“As we see traffic on our network grow significantly year-on-year, this agreement provides us with the capacity we need to keep innovating for customers and as such are committed to maintaining our high-capacity network,” Mohamed Hammady, director of Sky Network Services at BSkyB said.

The deal announced today will be improving the underlying infrastructure of BSkyB’s broadband network. The impact might not be felt straight away, but Virgin Media Business claims that in the long run, the development will help deal with the increased demand for services.

The new connectivity established by Virgin Media should also help Sky accelerate the timeframe needed for the company to develop and deliver new products and services – take its on-demand streaming services Sky Go and Sky Go Extra, for instance – to its colossal group of customers nationwide.

In the end, additional network capacity acrosss the UK can only be good news for Sky broadband customers. Oh, and an extra £49 million probably won’t go amiss at Virgin Media either.

Image Credit: BEN STANSALL/AFP/GettyImages