Virgin Media puts pressure on mobile operators for 2025 vision
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Virgin Media puts pressure on mobile operators for 2025 vision

A UK fibre provider has placed pressure on mobile operators by describing the lack of wireless infrastructure as the main hurdle preventing future advances in technology.

Wireless infrastructure in the UK needs to drastically improve in order to meet the needs of tomorrow, according to a local business leader.

Virgin Media Business MD, Mark Heraughty, shared his views as the company unveiled a vision for connectivity in 2025, with M2M connectivity at the centre of home and work life, smartphones able to support holographic telepresence, and 3D printers for prescription medication.

While Heraughty believed that the UK’s fixed infrastructure would be able to keep up with demand due to advances in technology, he was less optimistic about wireless connectivity. “The real challenge is away from the home, away from the office for mobile data delivery. That is the key limiting factor,” he said.

Virgin’s Welcome to Generation IP: 2025 study predicts that data stored by 2025 will amount to 100 zettabytes, or the equivalent of 36 billion years of HD video. But Heraughty admitted that infrastructure needed to be drastically improved to meet this demand.

In a bid to improve connectivity, UK mobile operators are increasingly looking to Virgin Media to equip their backhaul networks with gigabit fibre optics.

The provider’s customers include France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom joint venture Everything Everywhere, which will be the first to launch LTE services in the UK. The operator has selected Virgin to equip 2,000 of its cell sites with an optically delivered solution, in order to facilitate its 4G roll-out.

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